In short: The Devil’s Candy (2015)

The Hellmans - Metal-loving artist Jesse (Ethan Embry), his waitress – and main bread winner – wife Astrid (Shiri Appleby), and their teen daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco) move into a house that’s a real bargain thanks to two deaths that happened there recently. Supposedly, the deaths that killed the previous owners were an accident followed by a heart attack, but the audience knows that a rather disturbing looking member of that family – we will later learn he is called Ray Smilie (Pruitt Taylor Vince) - had quite a bit to do with that, egged on by the Latin whispers he hears in his head.

Jesse will soon hear these whispers too and fall into the habit of creating new art in a trance during proper blackouts. Just as concerning is that Ray feels pulled towards his old home and begins to show an interest in Zooey that doesn’t promise anything good.

Like with director/writer Sean Byrne’s earlier movie, the much praised The Loved Ones, I can’t say I connected with The Devil’s Candy. Visually, Byrne is obviously a hell of a director: the film looks beautiful, the editing is exciting, interesting and clear, and he clearly knows how to get good performances out of his actors.

On the level of storytelling and atmosphere, the film just doesn’t work for me at all, though. I’m not very happy with the film’s depiction of the mentally ill (particularly not after the Loved Ones used the same clichés in the same way), something I can much easier ignore in films less obviously well made because directors who can barely keep their actors in the frame really shouldn’t be made responsible for this sort of thing, whereas the more easily talented filmmakers can and should be. That’s not my main trouble with the film, however. For me, it completely breaks down as a narrative in the final act, with a finale that seems rushed, character development that is so ill prepared I had the feeling someone had just cut out twenty to thirty minutes of character work (the whole deal with the devil subplot for Jesse seems to drop in out of nowhere too), and a final ten minutes or so that basically consist of the film shouting in the audience’s face while supposedly shocking stuff happens very loudly. Said “shocking stuff” unfortunately doesn’t shock me because the film didn’t do the preparation work to actually give me a reason to be shocked by it beyond the most basic “mildly non-mainstream loving family threatened by mentally ill man and Satan”!


The film probably aims for something nightmarish in the Italian tradition here, but for me, it just doesn’t work.