Directed by Steve Cohen. Written by Michel Machaud, Kelly Carlin, Robert McCall, and Steve Cohen
In the long take that opens Steve Cohen’s Devil In The Flesh, we watch Rose McGowan’s face as she pensively looks at a house fire off-screen, the light dancing on her face but not behind her eyes. What emotion hides within? Fear? Relief? Satisfaction? What is she thinking? Cohen wants us to ponder.
Not much, turns out, and the same can be said for Cohen, who’s helmed a very rote and unimaginative movie with Devil In The Flesh, a story about a high schooler who gets an obsessive crush on her creative writing teacher, with great consequences to follow.
This is a not-good movie that tries to power through on McGowan’s performance and salacious subject matter. If I had to say two positive things about it, which in this case feels like planting two toothpicks in the ground on which an elephant will soon stand, here they are: its premise isn’t bad and Rose McGowan is charismatic.
The house fire she observed at the movie’s beginning contained her character’s mother, it turns out, so as Debbie Strand, newly orphaned, but very unperturbed teen, she moves in with her grandmother. The grandmother is a bible-thumping crone of the old school, corporal punishment included. Debbie likes skimpy clothes and dislikes authority. They butt heads, naturally.
Putting their heads together in a different way are detectives Archer (Robert Silver) and Rosales (Phil Morris) who are investigating the house fire and want to talk to Debbie, because there’s something weird about that whole affair. About to learn how weird things can get: Peter Rinaldi, (Alex McArthur) a “cool” teacher who catches Debbie’s eye for reasons known only to her.
The script for Devil In The Flesh is a group project, which is usually a red flag, but you almost wish they’d asked one more person to join in the hope something original might spark. The smart lines are dumb, the dialogue far from flowing, and the twists you’d like for a thriller are more like slumps.
I’m not an actor, because if someone tells me to act natural, I’ll likely forget any notion of what that might look like and the result, however funny, is not fit for any screen. As Rinaldi, Alex McArthur makes me believe I could be an actor, because he has the same problem. I think that speaks for itself.
McGowan stands in contrast as a believable, even beguiling, human being, but she also must endure with Cohen’s directing style, which must be to just write notes on playing cards and throw the entire deck up into the air, then picking one up at random, and relaying that to McGowan. It’s all over the place, from scene to scene, like a marble in a blender.
The question of what drives a young woman like Debbie is one Cohen wants to leave ambiguous. We’re meant to ponder the depths of a person who’d stop at nothing to get what she wants, and gives no inkling why she wants what she desires. Let there be no ambiguity about this: Devil In The Flesh is a bad movie.
Mikkel Frederiksen 