at the devil's door movie review

At the Devil’s Door

With “At the Devil’s Door,” up-and-coming horror filmmaker Nicholas McCarthy makes good on the promise of “The Pact,” a moody but underdone ghost story. It’s not flawless: some of the big scares feel monotonous, and much of the dialogue errs on the side of corn (“He wants to be all of someone,” a character murmurs) or blatant theme-polishing (talk radio banter and heinous expository dialogue repeatedly assure us that “At the Devil’s Door” is about the American economic recession). But the movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect. 

McCarthy’s film kicks off in 1987 with an overlong, bombastic prologue. Waifish teen Hanna ( Ashley Rickards ) agrees to play an ominous shell-game with her boyfriend’s creepy trailer trash uncle and unwittingly sells her soul to the devil for $500. Then she goes home and is attacked by a mysterious shadow. Then comes the title card, and we skip ahead to the present, where a realtor named Leigh ( Catalina Sandino Moreno ) learns that one of her listings was the site of a bizarre suicide. Now it’s up to her artist sister Vera ( Naya Rivera of “Glee”) to figure out what happened and why it’s happening again.

McCarthy takes his time revealing information, so it takes a little while for Vera to become the main character in “At the Devil’s Door.” The film’s story is a relay race: control of the plot is handed off to each of the three main characters, but only after each woman has seen a ghost. For this reason, McCarthy doesn’t always seem to be in control of his film, a fact compounded by too-blunt dialogue, as when Leigh explains to a prospective buyer, “I know I can get you a good house, even with all the bad news out there.”  

But as the plot thickens, McCarthy’s grasp starts matching his reach . Until then, creepy atmosphere, and gorgeous cinematography (courtesy of director of photography Bridger Nielson) put the film through its paces. It also helps that McCarthy has a recipe-specific collection of tropes in minds for his film’s climactic but puzzling scare scenes: an out-of-focus, man-shaped shadow; a circular smudge on the floor; women suspended in mid-air by an invisible force; a frightened little girl in a red slicker straight out of “ Don't Look Now .” McCarthy liberally recycles these images in Vera, Hanna, and Leigh’s respective story arcs, but before the film threatens to become monotonous, McCarthy breaks his film’s cycle of shared generic motifs and confidently steers the film towards a devastating, dialogue-free confrontation that’s easily one of the creepiest, most haunting sequences in a recent American horror cinema.

“At the Devil’s Door” reminds me of an early John Carpenter film in that its characters are not, as Carpenter once put it, “[referring] to characters in other movies.” They do share a certain quality with Carpenter’s characters, though: they are simply conceived people whose actions tell you everything you need to know about them. You’ll remember McCarthy’s name after this one.

Simon Abrams

Simon Abrams is a native New Yorker and freelance film critic whose work has been featured in  The New York Times ,  Vanity Fair ,  The Village Voice,  and elsewhere.

• Ashley Rickards as Girl
• Naya Rivera as Vera
• Catalina Sandino Moreno as Leigh
• Kate Flannery as Rosemary
• Nicholas McCarthy

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At the Devil's Door Reviews

While some uneven plotting and awkward moments in character development mar the process, this is an illustrative example of how capably creepy independent American horror films still have the potential to be.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Jul 10, 2019

At The Devil's Door is not a horror movie that has much splatter, dialogue or, when taking the long view, originality. What it does have is real horror, which is the element most required here.

Full Review | Original Score: B | Jan 11, 2019

Writer-director Nicholas McCarthy's At The Devil's Door is a fright vehicle that dutifully tingles from time to time but somehow still feels strained in its creepy convictions. [An] atmospheric boofest...

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Nov 10, 2018

It created such a feeling of unease leaving me thoroughly creeped out long after the movie ended (without necessarily having any big in-your-face scares).

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Nov 3, 2018

Not all horror films need to shake you to your core, and good jumpy films like this are fun when your expectations are low.

Full Review | Aug 21, 2018

let[s] genre's demonic possessions & reality's housing repossessions collide at an uncanny crossroads where sociopolitics and scares meet. At stake is the American dream itself, emblematised here by a picket-fence home in the suburbs...

Full Review | Jun 1, 2016

McCarthy lends some visual flair to the generic material, but the clumsy screenplay turns a potentially compelling premise into an incoherent mess.

Full Review | Oct 31, 2014

McCarthy's marvelously unnerving set pieces are in service to a headscratcher of a story that never coagulates.

Full Review | Oct 2, 2014

McCarthy shows he's mastered the things we already know scare us onscreen; next, how about something we don't expect?

Full Review | Sep 26, 2014

Though disappointing content-wise, McCarthy's sophomore feature still demonstrates admirable attention to things that usually suffer in more superficially flashy horror efforts ...

Things pick up, but too late to really have any impact.

Full Review | Sep 25, 2014

In his attempt to pull "At the Devil's Door" inside out, McCarthy has forgotten to retain a gripping consistency to the work, rendering the effort distanced when it should snowball into something menacing.

Full Review | Original Score: C | Sep 13, 2014

Part Paranormal Activity, part Rosemary's Baby, it's never clear where the story is headed from one moment to the next

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Sep 12, 2014

The movie is so consistently moody, and so focused on driving you towards a gut-punch finale, that even valid complaints seem negligible in retrospect.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Sep 12, 2014

This is the sort of cinematic patchwork from which Brian De Palma made his name, yet the style and playfulness of Mr. De Palma's work are absent.

Full Review | Sep 11, 2014

Haunted houses and devilish deals are done to death, but Devil's Door, to its credit, tries a few things new and takes a handful of unexpected twists.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/10 | Sep 10, 2014

Creepy atmospherics aren't enough to compensate for the muddled storyline.

Full Review | Sep 8, 2014

An accumulation of dread in search of a properly fleshed-out screenplay to sustain it, the film plays like a show reel for writer-director Nicholas McCarthy's considerable craft.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 8, 2014

Deals up some infernal imagery that chillingly toys with concepts of identity and the unknown, yet these individual moments do not collectively build to anything of note.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Sep 4, 2014

Like a giant gob of peanut butter without any bread, McCarthy's film is an empty smother of tense disquiet that tastes fine, but sticks to the roof of the mouth.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 11, 2014

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‘at the devil’s door’: film review.

Horror filmmaker Nicholas McCarthy's sophomore feature pits two sisters against supernatural forces

By THR Staff

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AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR Still - H 2014

Proving himself more adept as director than screenwriter, Nicholas McCarthy has crafted a creepily atmospheric but narratively muddled follow-up to his acclaimed horror film debut, The Pact . Currently available on VOD prior to its theatrical release next month, At the Devil’s Door (previously and more generically titled Home ) lacks the potent scares and exploitative elements to truly please genre fans. But its thematic ambition and well-crafted elements mark the filmmaker as a talent to watch.

After an intense prologue in which a young woman ( Ashley Rickards of MTV’s Awkward ) sells her soul to the devil in Robert Johnson-style at a crossroad, the story picks up years later when ambitious real-estate broker Leigh ( Catalina Sando Moreno ) lands the assignment of selling a Los Angeles house belonging to a financially stressed middle-aged couple. Wandering through the empty home alone, she encounters a young woman who the couple later informs her is undoubtedly their runaway teenage daughter.

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After another encounter with the mysterious figure, which doesn’t end at all well for Leigh, the film shifts focus to her younger sister Vera ( Naya Rivera of Glee ), whose attempt to find out exactly what happened to her sibling results in yet another mysterious spectral encounter, this time with a little girl ( Ava Acres ), that leads to a violent incident and a mysterious pregnancy that may be the spawn of the devil.

If that plot description sounds confusing, well, so is the film. The fragmented, non-linear storyline never coheres in sufficiently compelling fashion, with its episodic structure — at times it feels like three separate stories loosely tied together — and deliberate ambiguity ultimately proving more frustrating than intriguing.

It’s a shame, because McCarthy — with the help of Bridger Nielso n ’s expert cinematography, the haunting ambient sound design and the fine, low-key performances by the three female leads — creates an unusually potent atmosphere of dread while largely avoiding cheap shock effects. That it all results in tedium seems like the devil’s handiwork.

Production: Candlewood Entertainment, Varient Pictures

Cast: Catalina Sandino Moreno , Naya Rivera, Ashley Rickards, Wyatt Russell, Ava Acres

Director/screenwriter: Nicholas McCarthy

Producer: Sonny Mallhi

Executive producers: Kyle Heller, Gina Resnick, Jeremy Platt, Nate Bolotin, Aram Tertzakian, Nick Spicer

Director of photography: Bridger Nielson

Editors: Bill Neil, Jake York

Production designer: Walter Barnett

Costume designer: Aubrey Binzer

Composer: Ronen Landa

No rating, 92 minutes

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Film Review: ‘At the Devil’s Door’

The maker of modest sleeper 'The Pact' returns with another slow-burning, well-crafted if ultimately less satisfying horror-thriller.

By Dennis Harvey

Dennis Harvey

Film Critic

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Nicholas McCarthy made a modestly promising feature debut with 2012’s “The Pact,” which spun his earlier short into a slow-burner that wound up grossing nearly 20 times its $400,000 budget (nearly half of that in U.K. theaters) and spawned a just-released sequel. Rather than involving himself with the latter, McCarthy makes his follow-up with “At the Devil’s Door,” a similarly small-scale horror-thriller whose somewhat larger thematic ambitions — this time the menace isn’t just some serial killer and/or his ghost but apparently Beezlebub himself — the pic doesn’t ultimately have the large-enough canvas or ideas to pull off. Opening Sept. 26 at Hollywood’s Arena Cinema, it looks to make a minor theatrical impact, but should do OK in ancillary formats.

In the effective opening sequence, a teenager (Ashley Rickards, TV’s “Awkward”) is persuaded by a new boyfriend to play a Three-card Monte-type shell game with his creepy “uncle.” For this, she’ll get $500 … in exchange for her soul, we later realize, though she stops laughing off that absurd prospect a little too late. Having been determined “special,” she’s told she’ll be called for one day as designated vessel for an unnamed being. Next time we see her, she’s violently assaulted by an invisible presence in her bedroom.

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Cut to newbie real-estate agent Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno), working in an environment of widespread foreclosures and economic hardships. A middle-aged couple who seem to be the parents of the earlier girl are eager to sell the house she’s since disappeared from. Disturbingly, Leigh has already seen a figure matching the missing youth’s description lurking about the now-empty home.

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But McCarthy’s rather messily confusing rather than cleverly misleading script complicates this setup when we realize that one protagonist in fact committed suicide more than two decades earlier — until then, the pic hasn’t indicated it takes place in more than one time period — and that Leigh has evidently mistaken her for another, still-living troubled teen (Olivia Crocicchia). Then Leigh herself is abruptly yanked from the narrative, causing her somewhat antisocial artist sister, Vera (Naya Rivera, “Glee”), to investigate and become the third successive principal protagonist. It’s fairly clear by now that the evil at hand is a supernatural shapeshifter looking for an unwilling woman to bear its progeny — and in Vera, who vehemently opposes any commitment greater than a one-night-stand, it might have found the ideal victim.

As “The Pact” and prior shorts proved, McCarthy has an above-average feel for quiet, sinister atmospherics and realistic character dynamics. But the torch passing between heroines here feels more disjointed than inventive. We don’t get enough time to grow emotionally invested in any of them, and it’s disappointing that we end up stuck with Rivera’s Vera; while she’s a more complicated figure, those complexities aren’t explored, leaving her simply rather off-putting. There’s also unnecessary befuddlement between the teenagers played by Rickards and Crocicchia teenagers that is presumably deliberate, but poorly handled nonetheless.

Moment to moment, the pic is well handled, and there are strong sequences, notably an evening of babysitting in which we fear the “possessed” teen sitter might do anything to her infant charge, plus a jolting, fleeting (but still the pic’s longest) glimpse of the demon nemesis in a cupboard. But given that what’s at stake here is apparently nothing less than the birth of the Antichrist, “At the Devil’s Door” (which premiered at SXSW last spring under the title “Home”) ends up too tentative and underdeveloped, playing like an attenuated prologue for a bigger film. That’s underlined by the whimper-rather-than-bang fadeout of a tepid, “Omen”-echoing postscript.

Though disappointing content-wise, McCarthy’s sophomore feature still demonstrates admirable attention to things that usually suffer in more superficially flashy horror efforts, notably credible real-world backgrounding (the nondescript Southern California locations suggest a middle class slipping haplessly toward poverty), naturalistic perfs, and habit of favoring creepy restraint over “gotcha!” moments. (Still, the pic could have used one or two more of the latter.) Tech and design contributions are likewise thoughtful.

Reviewed online, San Francisco, Sept. 23, 2014. Running time: 93 MIN.

• Production: An IFC Midnight release of a Candlewood Entertainment production in association with Varient Pictures. Produced by Sonny Mallhi. Executive producers, Kyle Heller, Gina Resnick, Jeremy Platt, Nate Bolotin, Aram Tertzakian, Nick Spicer. Co-producer, Steven Gorel.
• Crew: Directed, written by Nicholas McCarthy. Camera (color, HD), Bridger Nielson; editors, Bill Neil, Jake York; music, Ronen Landa; production designer, Walter Barnett; costume designer, Aubrey Binzer; set decorator, Sandy Hubshman; sound, Ryan James; re-recording mixers, Jason Gaya, Spencer Schwieterman; supervising sound editor, Chris Diebold; sound designer, Chris Terhune; special FX, Autonomous FX; stunt coordinators, Chris Daniels, Ralf Koch; 1st assistant director, Jeremy Phoenix; casting, Emily Schweber.
• With: Catalina Sandino Moreno, Naya Rivera, Ashley Rickards, Colin Egglesfield, Ava Acres, Michael Massee, Wyatt Russell, Nick Eversman, Tara Buck, Olivia Crocicchia, Daniel Roebuck.

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The terrifying true story behind new horror film 'At the Devil's Door'

Senior Writer

In the new horror film At the Devil’s Door , a young woman played by Awkward star Ashley Rickards makes a deal with the Devil, and it has terrifying consequences for pretty much every character in the movie, including a pair of sisters played by Catalina Sandino Moreno ( Maria Full of Grace ) and Naya Rivera ( Glee ).

Writer-director Nicholas McCarthy reveals he got the inspiration for At the Devil’s Door during a bizarre cab ride at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where his previous terror tale, The Pact , was screening.

“When I was at Sundance, a cab picked me up to take me back to the condo that I was staying in,” explains the filmmaker. “The cab driver was this Chilean guy and he asked me what I was there for. I said, I’m here for this movie called The Pact .’ He said, ‘Is that about a pact with the Devil? I made pact with the Devil.’ So I said, to this complete stranger, ‘Tell me about that!’

“He proceeded to tell me this story about when he was a teenager in Chile. His friends knew this witch doctor that you could sell your soul to—and his friends dared him to do this. To show his friends that he was fearless, he went to this witch doctor and the witch doctor performed this whole weird ritual. At the end of the ritual, this witch doctor said to him, ‘Now tell me your name.’ At this point the guy is starting to get nervous. All his kind of being-an-atheist was being called into question. So he asked, ‘Why? Why do you want to know my name?’ And this witch doctor says, “So He knows you name when He calls for you.’ So the guy told him his name: Enrique. And he claims that he went home, and that night he was sitting in his kitchen and he heard from upstairs this voice call, ‘Enrique!’ And he went upstairs and there was no one there.”

“So this cab driver told me this story, and at this point I’m sitting in his cab, idling in front of my condo in Park City. And I asked him, ‘So, what happens?’ He said, ‘I fell in love with this girl who lives up in Park City and now I’m a cab driver here. Nothing happens.’ But I had never heard anything exactly like that and so it stuck. A few months later, when I went up to this cabin to write, I took that story and combined it with this other story about sisters—which came from Psycho . I wanted to see what would happen if these two things got put together with an aim towards unsettling and disturbing the audience. So that really was the origin of it.”

Rest assured, McCarthy came up with a much more chilling conclusion for At the Devil’s Door , which arrives in theaters Friday. Watch the trailer below.

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At The Devil's Door (Movie Review)

Cc's rating: ★ ★ ★ ½ director: nicholas mccarthy | release date: 2014.

If lore is any indication, mankind has been desperately making deals with the devil since the beginning of time – and, in spite of the steep one-sidedness of the agreements’ contingencies, these deals persist. At least they do, in fact, wind up making for good stories.

At the Devil’s Door , originally titled Home , tells the stories of two young women and their ties to the netherworld. The film begins in the late 80s with Hannah (Ashley Rickards, MTV’s "Awkward") falling head over heels for some wannabe bad boy she just met (because of course she does). He talks her into meeting his Uncle Mike and playing a game with him for $500. Being young and in love, her brains are scrambled eggs, so Hannah agrees, and this solid decision-making leads her to her poor-man’s-James Dean’s creepy uncle, played by none other than Michael Masse ( Lost Highway , Se7en ) in a remote trailer that also veeeeery coincidentally happens to sit at a crossroads. They play the Shell Game, and after correctly guessing three times in a row, Uncle Mike tells her she’s been chosen and she can have the money if she walks down to the crossroads and says her name. She returns home, and after some disturbing events and terrifying paranormal experiences, she hangs herself in her bedroom.

Flash forward to the present day. Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno of " The Bridge ;" " Paris, je t’aime" ) is a hard-working young real estate agent being asked to sell a family’s home in light of the father’s declining health. We soon find out that the family’s daughter ran off with a boyfriend and hasn’t returned to the home since it was put on the market. We also learn of the daughter’s troubled history, including, y’know, burning part of the home while she lived there. When Leigh starts to inspect the home, she runs into a girl she assumes is the runaway daughter. Once this happens again, she makes contact with the girl and tries to help her – which proves to be a fatal mistake. Because Leigh missed her darkly withdrawn sister Vera’s (" Glee ’s" Naya Rivera) art opening, Vera becomes worried and eventually hears her sister suffered a heart attack at the home she was preparing to sell.

Investigating the home and her sister’s belongings, Vera is drawn along the sinister path lain before her. After visiting the home and all manner of shadowy weirdness, Vera returns to her loft, where she is attacked by an unseen force and thrown from a window. She awakens from a coma eight months later and – surprise! – is with child. Understandably freaked out, she demands a C-section and an adoption.

Flash forward again six more years into the future: a small girl watches catastrophic events on the television and her mother tells her she will have a guest later. Vera shows up to meet the young girl, tell her that she is her biological mother, and demand to know what she is.

Overall, A t the Devil’s Door ’s premise is pretty simple, combining elements of “devil’s child” films like Rosemary’s Baby or The Omen . Writer/director Nicholas McCarthy ( The Pact ) competently builds and sustains momentum by allowing the timeline to unfold arrhythmically and exploring details from multiple angles. All three female leads deliver solid, nuanced performances while maintaining believable chemistry throughout. Even Ava Acres (voices from Frozen, Happy Feet and Wreck It Ralph ) embodies terror reminiscent of Harvey Stephens as Damien. The female-driven cast allows for a tight, palpable emotional balance between the obligations of blood ties and resilient individualism. In fact, the film’s feminine aspects also are probably its most interesting. Even though the demon is referred to as a “he” throughout the film, it’s an interesting flip that the child is a little girl, and though it could be argued that she is used as a vessel, Acres’ tense, terrific, surprisingly mature performance speaks for itself. 

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Home » Horror News » At the Devil’s Door (Movie Review)

At the Devil’s Door (Movie Review)

Last Updated on July 22, 2021

PLOT: A teenaged girl's decision to sell her soul to the devil has devastating consequences (duh!) on not only her, but a realtor who, years later, has to sell her house.

REVIEW: With AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR (RENT IT HERE) , director Nicholas McCarthy proves himself a very capable orchestrator of eeriness and dread. He drags sequences of foreboding to their limit, accentuating them with low, disquieting hums before springing loud pangs of noise for maximum jump-out-of-your-seat fright. With a tight script and a bit more seasoning, he might deliver something truly effective along the lines of James Wan's best films.

But he's not working with a tight script here, and AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR is ultimately a robotic effort. Indeed, McCarthy wrote the script himself, and the film – about a demon looking for just the right body to possess – ends up resembling a patchwork of finer horror films. (You could list off ROSEMARY'S BABY, DON'T LOOK NOW, THE OMEN and several others dutifully throughout.) As an old saying goes, he knows the notes but not the music: he's copied the look and feel of the best the genre has to offer, but he's neglected the fact that the story and characters are what make those movies memorable, not just the myriad frights. AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR feels like it's a jumble of scary scenes in search of a coherent plot.

The movie begins with a rather strange sequence: a young woman (Ashley Rickards) decides to sell her soul to a sinister fellow in a shack for a measly wad of money. What for? I'm not sure the purpose. (Because she's in love with her weirdo boyfriend and he wants her to do it?) Before long, she's hearing voices and clearly being haunted by some kind of demon (maybe it's even "The Devil!") and, ultimately, finds herself possessed. But the movie isn't interested in her very much, so at about the 15 minute mark the baton is passed to a new character: a realtor (Catalina Santino Moreno) tasked with selling the house of a troubled couple whose daughter just ran away from home. One thing standing in the way of a successful sale: a girl in a red raincoat appears to be haunting the grounds. Is it the couple's missing daughter? The young lady from the prologue? Are they the same person – or is this something entirely different?

We become engaged with the realtor's story just long enough for it to abruptly come to a halt in favor of yet another new focus: the realtor's sister, an artist named Vera (Naya Rivera), who is now forced to investigate the succession of ominous events going down at that house. At this point, McCarthy's conceit is quite clear: he's attempting to keep us off-balance by never allowing us to get used to one particular protagonist. It's a neat trick, but a trick all the same. It's tough to become deeply invested in the overall story if McCarthy won't let us settle in with a lead – or even leads – we actually care about. The fact that he's switching things up at a moment's notice doesn't draw us in closer, it pushes us away.

The story may be a muddle, but the most nagging thing about AT THE DEVIL'S DOOR is that it often feels like an audition tape for the director. The concepts in the movie don't really make sense, and characters act in fully irrational ways (see: that girl selling her soul for no discernible reason); each action is there to serve as a jumping-off point for one of McCarthy's set-pieces. To his credit, there are a handful of potent sights to be seen: a levitating body jerking around as an unseen monster invades; a thoroughly effective look at the demonic entity as he hides in a confined space; a shadowy figure looming way in the background, inching ever closer to an unwitting victim in the foreground. Again, none of these are new ideas, but McCarthy's like an expert imitator, regurgitating his favorite genre cliches with precision.

There isn't much to say one way or the other about the cast, as McCarthy keeps his three leads fairly devoid of action or reaction. All three – Rickards, Moreno and Rivera – have close to the same facial expression throughout, that of uneasy shock or concern. If anything, Rickards proves that she's more than just the cutie from MTV's "Awkward," which I've never actually seen but know it's about one million miles away from her frightened, paranoid turn here. The actresses don't have much backstory to play with, or even true vulnerability to display, so I can only give them credit for staying just present enough to register.

BELOW AVERAGE

About the Author

Eric Walkuski is a longtime writer, critic, and reporter for JoBlo.com. He's been a contributor for over 15 years, having written dozens of reviews and hundreds of news articles for the site. In addition, he's conducted almost 100 interviews as JoBlo's New York correspondent.

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At the Devil's Door (2014)

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At the Devil's Door | In southern California a demonic entity is looking for a new home

It's looking for a home.

Supernatural horror thriller At the Devil's Door pays an In Memorium tribute in the credits to Spanish filmmaker Jess Franco . But its tale of an immigrant real-estate agent (Catalina Sandino Moreno) who falls foul of a demonic entity while trying to sell a haunted house in southern California owes far less to Franco’s brand of pervvy erotic horror than to the likes of Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen . Writer-director Nicholas McCarthy ( The Pact ) does a good job of building a mood of dread in individual scenes but fails to bind them into a compelling whole.

Certificate 15. Runtime 91 mins. Director Nicholas McCarthy

At the Devil's Door (aka Home) debuts on Sky Cinema Premiere on 30 November. Available on DVD & Digital from The Works.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anZuooQ8J1A

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Review: at the devil’s door.

The film plays like a show reel for McCarthy’s considerable craft.

Nearly all the pleasures to be derived from writer-director Nicholas McCarthy’s technically accomplished but terminally disjointed At the Devil’s Door exist independent of its narrative, manifest in wordless standalone set pieces that thrum with tension. What’s lacking is the necessary connective tissue of thematic coherence and fully realized characters. An accumulation of dread in search of a properly fleshed-out screenplay to imbue its mess of plot elements with structure or purpose, the film plays like a show reel for McCarthy’s considerable craft.

Said elements are a pastiche of several decades’ worth of horror staples. The story kicks off with a bit of rural devil worship when a young woman (Ashley Rickards), on vacation in some infernal-looking California desert, is convinced by her boyfriend to play a sinister local’s shell game in return for a wad of cash. When she wins, the man—a dead ringer for Billy Drago and, therefore, clearly evil—informs her that she’s been “chosen” and asks her to walk to a crossroads and say her name aloud so “He” can find her. Improbably, the girl complies, only to discover upon returning home that “He” is neither human nor benevolent and has, as advertised, found her. These events, however, merely constitute a prolonged introduction. The bulk of the film takes place years later, focusing on immigrant real-estate agent Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) and her artist sister, Vera (Naya Rivera), with whom she has a strained relationship. Leigh has been hired to sell the now thoroughly haunted house in which the young woman used to live and, in the process of doing so, attracts the attention of the entity that possessed her.

Despite stealing from every haunted-house and demonic-possession film imaginable, the premise appears ambitious in its multi-generational, decades-spanning scope. It’s a bold move for McCarthy to use a supernatural antagonist as the catalyst for what promises initially to be a story about three women trying to figure out their place in the world. The first act even pays lip service to some potentially meaty thematic concerns, particularly the double-edged nature of intense familial bonds, and the dreams and disappointments attendant to the immigrant experience. Unfortunately, the character-driven approach teased by these glimmers of substance are soon abandoned in favor of an overlong middle section that consists almost exclusively of one or other of the women creeping around a dark house or apartment as the demon skulks in the shadows.

McCarthy has a legitimate talent for staging these sequences. His compositions are meticulously designed and awash in shadow, frequently leaving key swathes of space obscured or out of sight, prompting imaginative speculation about what might lie just beyond a character’s field of vision. Jump scares abound, but they rarely feel unearned. Special effects are used with vicious economy, ably complementing the cinematography and the disquieting, near-subliminal drone that overlays the soundtrack during the set pieces. Ultimately, though, the overuse of such scenes starts to rob them of their effectiveness. With so much time spent on the women’s inexplicable perambulations through haunted environs, there’s little scope for building character or resolving emotional conflicts, let alone following up on the ideas tossed around before the jump scares started to drop. By the time the film winds down to a nonsensical copout of an ending that plunders both Rosemary’s Baby and The Omen , it feels like little more than a haunted-house attraction, a series of random shocks to the system that add up to precisely nothing.

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Review: ‘At the Devil’s Door’ builds up to horror but never gets inside

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Writer-director Nicholas McCarthy’s “At the Devil’s Door” is indie horror with an emphasis on mood over scares, and that’s not always a bad thing.

It opens on the ill-fated decision of a teenage girl (Ashley Rickards) to play a creepy man’s game of chance in a beaten-down trailer in the desert. Nothing good ever comes of the words “He’s chosen you,” and later, she’s attacked in her bedroom by an unseen force.

Cut to years later, when real estate agent Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno) discovers a mysterious girl in a red rain slicker squatting in a house she’s trying to sell, but is she the sellers’ missing daughter?

If this all sounds disjointed, it is, and when McCarthy shifts focus to Leigh’s artist sister Vera (Naya Rivera), who ultimately has the grimmest exchange with the movie’s evil spirit, things pick up, but too late to really have any impact.

Much of “At the Devil’s Door” is patiently atmospheric scenes of actresses in shadowy spaces alone, which is a time-honored component of classic haunted house fare, but with such an arrhythmic and meager story around it, the overall effect falls flat. “At the Devil’s Door” goes right up to the threshold of being an interesting possession saga but never truly gets inside.

---------------------------

“At the Devil’s Door”

MPAA rating: None

Running time: 1 hour, 32 minutes.

Playing: At the Arena Cinema, Hollywood.

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Movie Review: At the Devil’s Door

Screen grab from the At the Devil’s Door official trailer.

MANILA, Philippines—The motion picture itself does not fall short of the eerie and shriek-inducing scenes expected of a horror film. Most encounters were dark enough to indicate the presence of an unwanted visitor and the sound effects were put just in the right space to cause gasps and make eyes close in surprise. But once you sit down to ponder on the story, as in the very substance of what you just watched, you might find yourself asking, “So what really happened?”

The Nicholas McCarthy film “At the Devil’s Door” revolves around three heroines: Hanna White (Ashley Rickards), Leigh (Catalina Sandino Moreno), and Vera (Naya Rivera), with Hanna being the starting point of the conflict. It was in 1987 when the 17-year-old girl started dating a guy she barely knew, and then she was allured to playing this shell game with a random, obviously satanic, man who’d give her $500 after the game.

Hanna, who successfully wins all three guesses in the shell game, was given the money and then she was instructed to go somewhere isolated. There, she was to whisper her name so “he” would know that she is the “chosen one.” Though trembling in fear, Hanna still followed every instruction given to her, and then later on, she suffered the consequences of her actions.

Jumping to the present, the film immediately introduced two new heroines, sisters Leigh and Vera. Leigh was a real estate agent while Vera—an artist who refuses to be in a committed relationship.

These two had nothing to do with the pact that Hanna made when she played the shell game. But for some reasons, they ended up experiencing the worst outcome of the young girl’s experimental act.

In truth, if not for Bridger Nielson’s gorgeous cinematography and Bill Neil and Jake York’s solid sense of editing, the film would have been nothing more than a black and white screenplay with a stereotypical take on girls with extra dark eyeliners, and a complete disregard on people who arrived within the vicinity before Leigh and Vera did.

Whose door are you standing at?

Screen grab from At the Devil’s Door official trailer.

If taken literally, the movie tells the unfortunate account of three heroines who never stood a chance against a force so dark and powerful as the evil element in the story.

But if scrutinized beyond what it offers, we will realize that we all have a devil’s door where we once stood at—if we’re not currently still standing there. In reality, we don’t go to random people to play shell games and sell souls, but we do face temptation every single day because it always comes to us.

Once it calls—“Come to me”—how strong are we to resist it? We have the freedom to choose whether we’ll turn the door’s knob or not, whether we’ll cross the door or we’ll stay away from it. But in Hanna’s case, she did. She opened the door, crossed it, and succumbed to the force without a fighting chance.

Leigh on the other hand didn’t have any idea what she was dealing with. She tried facing it head on, but she lost the battle. And Vera, she who was called “dark” and was detached from the norm of this world, fought the longest battle against free will.

In the end, the three heroines were overpowered by the evil force. Perhaps, this is the movie’s way of asking, had you been in their shoes, would you have opened it? Would you have crossed the door? If yes, are you prepared for its consequences?

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