Fantastic Fest 2011: THE DEVIL'S BUSINESS Review

I walked into The Devil's Business without having read a synopsis. Walking out of it, I feel quite conflicted about my response to the film.  Sean Hogan (Little Deaths) knows how to write a tense story with little breathing room.  At only seventy-five minutes, the film has very little flab.  It gets to the goods very quickly, and progresses in a way that keeps the viewer on his toes. In the end, the film is about 90% successful in its quest to unsettle its audience, but, unfortunately, it falters in the final reel.  This digression turns what should have been a home run, into a stand up triple, but it was enough of a buzzkill to make me hesistant to give it an all out recommendation.

Two gangsters break into a man's home one night in order to take him out of the picture. The elder, Pinner (Billy Clarke) is a man simply doing his job, along for the ride is a greenfoot named Cully (Jack Gordon). Cully is in the business for a laugh, but Pinner is in it for the long haul. he's made a career of taking out his boss's trash, and views this night like any other. He is there to do the job, not to ask questions.  Unluckily for Cully, he likes questions, and when the pair hears a noise in the garage they go to investigate, only to find that this job may not be as simple as they'd hoped.

To reveal much more of the plot would be cruel.  Despite its short run time, The Devil's Business is very careful about setting up pins to be knocked down later on.  Let's just say that the character they are engaged to dispose is not your average Joe, he has some occult hobbies. These occult insertions into the plot are very well done, and create a pervasive feeling of unease and dread throughout the film.  Even the old salt, Pinner, becomes very uncomfortable with the job and tries to get more answers than usual from his employer, only to be told that it is a job that matters more than most and not to fail.

For a film that is tightly scripted to the last detail, I feel like the climax of The Devil's Business is a rather clumsy attempt to insert unneeded spectacle into an otherwise very smart film.  The final few minutes of the film are so incredibly unnecessary that I went from unqualified praise to almost bitter disappointment. While I can see where the film was attempting to go, I think it just overshot its mark an ended up somewhere in left field when it could have been a contender. The bad thing is that since the film is already so short, I can't think of a way to edit that ending into one more fitting without make the damned thing too short. Sorry, guys, I was almost ready to follow you anywhere, then you ran me into a wall.