In short: I Trapped the Devil (2019)

Surprise family visits on Christmas are seldom a great idea, yet still Karen (Susan Burke) has talked her husband Matt (AJ Bowen) into driving up to Matt’s brother Steve’s (Scott Poythress) house as a bit of a surprised. Karen’s clearly thinking this might be a great opportunity to smooth things over between the brothers who have grown estranged after Steve lost his family in an accident. Matt, you see, clearly isn’t much of a guy to understand a close relative’s psychological troubles when they start to become bothersome to him.

It really turns out to be a surprise, for not only does Steve seem even more depressed than the last time anyone here talked, and is rather adamant they’re not going to stay, but something’s not at all right in the house. There’s a palpable air of dread and doom hanging over the place even Matt has a hard time pretending to be not there. It would indeed probably be better for everyone involved if Karen and Matt would leave but they are snowed in quickly. Eventually, Steve is admitting his secret: he is convinced he has locked the Devil up in his cellar. In Steve’s interpretation, the Devil is the force responsible for everything bad that happens not caused by humans themselves (which is an interesting way to frame evil) and as long as he is keeping him prisoner, the world will become an increasingly less horrible place.

Of course, Matt and Karen do at first believe Steve has lost it completely and has locked up some poor bastard down in the cellar, but the whole atmosphere of the place, as well as the disquieting behaviour of Steve’s victim, do open up the dreadful possibility that there’s something to what he says.

There’s a lot I like about Josh Lobo’s I Trapped the Devil. There’s the heavy atmosphere of dread and doom mostly constructed out of classical Christmas colours (which also happen to be classical horror movie colours, go figure), a gloomy night, blurry visions on a TV screen, and a core acting trio that’s as good at suggesting being surrounded by a feeling of wrongness as they are at portraying the film’s more quotidian family troubles (quotidian, as always, does not mean without weight).


You could argue against the film that it really isn’t taking its basic idea very far at all, but to me, it’s exactly this willingness to focus on these three people and how the thing that may or may not be in the cellar and the mood it carries with it brings the divisions between them into clearest view, that makes I Trapped the Devil as successful as it is. As a matter of fact, I find the personal apocalypse of these three people much more concerning and moving than another tale of the devil or a demon doing apocalyptic shit again. And really, Lobo’s ability to keep the film’s palpable mood of dread up for eighty minutes without ever resorting to jump scares or obvious visual clichés is a thing to behold, turning this into a wonderfully contained and focused film that’s actually rather difficult to forget.