I give it a little extra love for employing Tom Noonan whose calm, measured voice coupled with his large stature, always makes him seem simultaneously inviting and menacing. The movie itself is slow in a way that wants to invoke Kubrick's The Shining, but really just invokes boredom.A young student, Samantha (Jocelin Donahue), needs money so she decides to take the creepiest babysitting job in history. She agrees even after being stood up by Tom Noonan's Mr. Ulman, getting driven into the middle of nowhere by her best friend Megan (Greta Gerwig), and finding out that the job isn't actually for a child but for Ulman's elderly mother. Ulman assures her that she won't have to do a thing. His mother is still able-bodied, he just wants Samantha there in case of an emergency. Sure, sounds like a great gig. She does need that money though, so whatcha gonna do? So she accepts and sends Megan, who thinks she's nuts, on her way.
Anyone wanna guess if Samatha sits and watches TV like she tells Megan she's going to? If you said yes, you're way off. Instead, Samantha: dances on the furniture, breaks a vase, and starts snooping through the house at an alarming rate. Eventually she snoops her way into finding the old lady she's supposedly "babysitting." Well sort of. She also finds out that the Ulman's have, or at the very least had, a son. The end result of all this snooping and disrespect? Samantha tied to a pentagram, soon to play host to "Mother's" rebirth. I wonder what would have happened if she just sat there watching TV. Would the Ulman's eventually just burst in? 'Ah, we expected you to be a little less respectful. Sorry, could you come lay down in this back room for us? Mother's getting really old and really ugly and could really use someone who looks like Margot Kidder, via Black Christmas, to inhabit.' Samanatha doesn't go quietly but escapes her bonds and makes a break for it, but not before being force fed some of "Mother's" blood. You know that's never good. Somehow, though the film doesn't really take the time to explain, she seems to realize and understand what's going on. Despite regurgitating much of the blood it's clear Samanatha isn't going to win this battle over "The Devil." She actually does the right thing once she knows that she can't stop what's happening to her; she blows her brains out. The film cuts to black right after the gunshot, and if it had ended there, on that image, I might have forgiven its other faults. Unfortunately director Ti West can't refrain from one more shot, ostensibly inserted to create an ambiguous ending but ending up feeling more like a cop out.
Perhaps if the film wasn't so lazily written I would find the visualization more compelling. West has seen a lot of good horror films but rather than incorporate those influences into something distinct and unique he ends up with a pale facsimile, full of perfunctory scenes that numb instead of excite (or, heaven forbid, scare). I haven't seen any of his other films but with a little more confidence in his own voice he may be able to stand out in a horror world that is saturated by "found footage" films, and even more egregiously rehashed plots and ideas. I would certainly be more interested in West's future work over the next half-assed remake of a slasher film. Still, it's hard to recommend The House of the Devil. If it weren't for Noonan I'd say skip it and wait for West to grow a little but his scenes are enough to make it worth a look, if you've nothing better to do.
