[HanCinema's Film Review] "Devils Stay"

With 200,089 admissions at the South Korean box office to date, "Devils Stay" hasn't been a huge hit since its premiere on November 14th. To be fair, expectations may have been a bit inflated from the outset, given that "Exhuma" earlier this year nearly hit 12 million admissions, and these are very similar movies. Even beyond genre, "Devils Stay" uses methodical pacing, dividng the story into a preface, a postscript, and three days of a traditional South Korean funeral.

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So-mi (played by Lee Re) is a teenage girl who was suffering from heart failure, but her father, Seung-do (played by Park Shin-yang) was able to acquire a new heart for her using not entirely ethical means. Shortly after the successful transplant, So-mi became the victim of a demonic possession. Father Ban (played by Lee Min-ki) apparently drove the demon out, and yet So-mi still died. Hence the traditional South Korean funeral.

If I had to point to one thing here that might not have grabbed the attention of the audience, it's that the twists are pretty obvious. I feel like simply writing out the plot like that is enough to spoil the entire movie, really, since it's so obvious that So-mi isn't really dead there's not a lot of tension. Scenes of Seung-do going borderline psychotic and terrifying don't land as much when we already know he isn't imagining that his daughter is alive, and there's plenty of other objectively weird stuff going on that can't be explained either way.

Father Ban is very much the odd man out here, because he's both a perspective character and a trustworthy, sympathetic one too. He has a backstory of being involved in a war zone exorcism, for no obvious reason I could think of except that it explains how in one scene he's able to beat up a couple of burly Russians. My point being, since Seung-do and Father Ban never really disagree on what's happening, and no other characters' perspective are considered, there's just not much ambiguity to the story.

It's a bit of a shame really, because "Devils Stay" has a lot of positives. The camerawork is excellent, genuinely eerie, and the editing is appropriately disorienting during scenes where Seung-do is truly losing his grip on reality. While the movie looks good, though, it just isn't that interesting. We never wonder whether Seung-do is just acting out in grief or if there really is something supernatural going on, because the Father Ban scenes make it quite clear that the demonic possession element of the story is very real.

"Devils Stay" doesn't even work as a metaphor bridging the two because, again, the movie is more focused on its not terribly original mythology than it is the characters. Seung-do's wife and son are such a non-presence I'm not even sure they have names. I could see what director Hyeon Moon-seob was trying to do, cutting "Devils Stay" to a fairly manageable ninety minute runtime. He just wasn't emphasizing the most important parts, was the problem.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Devils Stay" is directed by Hyeon Moon-seob, and features Park Shin-yang, Lee Min-ki, Lee Re, Kim Nam-woo, Woo Min-ji, Yun Jong-seok. Release date in Korea: 2024/11/14.

"Devils Stay" in Select Theaters December 6 in USA and Canada

Official film page: wellgousa.com/films/devils-stay