“Something’s wrong with Steve,” observes his brother Matt in Josh Lobo’s decidedly unseasonal Christmas chiller. “I think he might be dangerous.” And with just cause – Steve is clearly a deeply troubled man but has he become deranged following a family tragedy or is he sincere about what he’s got trapped down in his basement?
It’s Christmas Eve and Matt (A.J. Bowen) and his wife Karen (Susan Theresa Burke) arrive at the home of Matt’s estranged brother Steve (Scott Poythress) only to find him surly and unwelcoming. Imposing themselves on him, the couple become increasingly alarmed by his behaviour. There’s a loaded gun in the bedroom, a room full of press clippings covered in the obligatory spiders web of red connective string and worse still something odd is going on in the basement. Steve holding man prisoner in his cellar, in a locked room protected by a huge wooden cross – and he claims that it’s the Devil himself…
Fans of The Twilight Zone will be irresistibly reminded of the episode The Howling Man (4 November 1960), written by Charles Beaumont (based on his short story) and directed by Douglas Heyes. There, an American travelling Europe in the aftermath of World War I finds himself in a castle run by a strange religious order who are similarly keeping a man chained up in a dungeon, a man his captors also claim is the Devil. One might also recall Mickey Keating’s film Pod (2015) which has a remarkably similar central idea – in Keating’s film, the deranged man is visited by his brother and sister who find that their unhinged sibling has trapped what he claims to be an alien monster in his basement.
So I Trapped the Devil is hardly brimming over with originality but gets by on bags of atmosphere conjured up by Lobo’s direction, composer Ben Lovett’s rumbling, menacing ambient score and Bryce Holden’s sometimes impenetrable but always moody photography. The three strong central performances help us over the slower spots, of which there are plenty. It’s a very slow burn but economically builds to an intense finale that makes the deliberately leisurely pace worth the wait. The final shots weirdly suggest that I Trapped the Devil could even be a prequel to Federico Fellini’s Toby Dammit story in Histoires extraordinaires/Spirits of the Dead (1968)…
Lobo peppers his script with some humour – the trio hold terribly earnest conversations about what to do if that really does turn out to be the Devil behind that door – and commendably keeps us guessing as to what it is that Steve’s up to. He may just be paranoid, but what if he isn’t? And how close are Matt and Karen to buying into his strange but persuasive belief system? We know what sort of film this is so the ending is never really in doubt but Lobo pulls it off with some aplomb and still manages to leave us unsure of what we’ve just seen even as the end credits start to roll.
I Trapped the Devil requires a huge amount of patience and goodwill from its audience (the mid-section drags and could easily have been jettisoned, turning the film into a more effective short) but there’s still much to enjoy here. It’s not clear for a very long time whether Steve is delusional or not – has he really trapped the Devil or has he just kidnapped an innocent passer-by? – and Lobo has a way with ratcheting up tension. It won’t appeal to those in search of gore, fast thrills or more traditional screen representations of the Devil but will reward those with the patience to sit through the longueurs with a nicely ambiguous ending.
Josh Lobo’s only credit prior to I Trapped the Devil was as part of the art department on Bill Watterson’s Dave Made a Maze (2017). I Trapped the Devil marks him out as an inventive director who needs to work a bit on his scripts (less derivative and less padded would be good places to start) but whose work in the future should at the very least be interesting.
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