2 Stars (out of 4)
Note: I sometimes branch out from reviewing Hindi films. The Korean horror movie Devils Stay opens in US theaters December 6, 2024.
Had the story of Devils Stay been told chronologically, it could have been a compelling examination of guilt and faith leading up to a climax with terrifying consequences. Instead, the asynchronous timeline hampers character development and fails to build tension.
Devils Stay — directed by Hyun Moon-seop — opens with a typical exorcism movie scene. Teenage girl Cha So-mi (Lee Re) is tied to the bed in a befouled room. Young priest Father Ban (Lee Min-ki) prays over So-mi, who levitates and screams for her dad’s help. Cha Seung-do (Park Shin-yang) breaks down the door to get to his daughter, just in time to watch her die.
A flashback shows So-mi and her father gazing at the stars atop the roof of the hospital where she is a heart patient and he works as a cardiac surgeon. He says that they’ve found a donor heart for her, promising her that everything will be all right after her surgery.
Back in the present, her family gathers at the funeral hall for the start of three days of mourning. A despondent Seung-do thinks he hears So-mi calling to him and sees apparitions of her, convincing him that she’s not really dead. Meanwhile, Father Ban worries that his exorcism was incomplete and that something evil still lurks within So-mi’s body.
One feature of South Korea that makes Devils Stay interesting is that hospitals often have their own funeral homes, usually in the basement near the morgue. That makes it convenient if, say, a heart surgeon who thinks his deceased daughter is secretly alive wants to grab her days-dead body and take it up to a surgical suite to apply the defibrillator pads one last time.
Other than the understandable sentiment of a father who lost his child and a priest who failed his parishioner, there are few emotional hooks in Devils Stay. There’s simply too much missing information to really become invested in the characters. We don’t know how much time elapsed between So-mi’s heart surgery and when she started exhibiting symptoms of possession. We don’t see her interact with her classmates, who appear in just one scene to say she wasn’t behaving like herself in school. We don’t know whose idea it was to summon the exorcist or what other interventions they tried first.
Father Ban has his own thin backstory that is shown in dramatic flashbacks that lack context. The particular dangers to him as an exorcist and the theological consequences of So-mi’s possession could have been more developed, rather than dismissed with an out-of-left-field explanation that’s merely an excuse to put Lee Min-ki into a fight scene.
The choppy timeline also makes it hard for any of the performances to stand out, since we don’t really get a sense of how the characters grow. Other characters like So-mi’s mom and younger brother are afterthoughts from a plot standpoint, and their mere existence doesn’t do enough to give shape to the world the three main characters inhabit.
Reorganizing the timeline and fleshing out some of the characters could have made Devils Stay feel more meaningful than it does in its current form. As it is, the film is more like a random collection of mandatory exorcist-movie scenes without a strong point of view.
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