Written and Directed by: Adrián García Bogliano
Starring: Laura Caro, Francisco Barreiro, and Michele Garcia
Reviewed by: Brett Gallman
"It was the devil."
Having helmed 11 movies during the past decade, it’s fair to say that Adrian Garcia Bogliano is one of the most prolific directors in this or any other genre. Clearly, he has the ambition and the means to crank out a wide array of unsettling ideas, from cults invading an apartment building to re-imagining The Wages of Fear in another apartment complex (never rent property in Argentina is what he’s saying). His fertile filmography feels like a prelude to Here Comes the Devil, a film that’s stuffed with enough plot developments for at least three scripts; I imagine many filmmakers would love to stumble upon one of them, and Bogliano essentially uses them to screw with his audience. It almost seems unfair.
Here Comes the Devil opens in the throes of sex (a place it wallows in early and often), with two women enjoying each other’s company until a machete-wielding maniac interrupts. After some frenzied bloodletting, the scene shifts to the ominous outskirts of Tijuana, where Felix (Francisco Barreiro) and Sol (Laura Caro) are vacationing with their children. While stopping at a gas station on the way home, they get frisky in the car and lose sight of the kids when they wander off to explore a nearby cave. When the two don’t return, the two are despondent, and their already tenuous marriage becomes even more unstable. Only the mysterious return of the children the next day stabilizes the situation—at least until Sol begins to suspect these might not be their children after all.
And that’s just the set-up. By this point, Here Comes the Devil has already shifted from a lurid sex-and-slash movie (shades of De Palma and any number of psychosexual thrillers) to a more brooding, unsettling drama in the vein of The Vanishing (a close-up on a coffee dispenser in the gas station is a wink) and Don’t Look Now (ditto the red coat worn by the daughter). The whiplash feels like someone mixed up the reels for two different films, as it only finds a stable footing in Bogliano’s replication of 70s Eurohorror, particularly its shaggy energy and disorienting cinematography (there are enough zooms to even give Mario Bava pause). Bogliano might be quick to shift gears, but he’s slow to reveal much of anything, save for his influences.
When Here Comes the Devil continues to feel like a buffet line with the addition of even more ingredients (implied incest, child molesters, revenge killings, haunted landscapes, urban legends, possession), you wonder if it’s all going anywhere or if Bogilano is just tossing chunks against the wall to see what sticks. Somewhat remarkably, it’s the former, and while Bogliano’s explanation is a familiar refrain (“the devil made me do it!”), it’s slyly delivered. The film’s title provides an obvious hint to assist its laconic exposition to paint a tableau suggesting that the devil would look to unleash a controlled chaos. You don’t see him resting on the characters’ shoulders or whispering into his ears, but his sinister presence is felt in every frame on the film, whether it’s in the overtly supernatural or the characters’ destructive decisions.
If the devil were real, I imagine this is how he would operate: by lurking in the background and relying on the power of suggestion. Actual evil pulses through Here Comes the Devil: in the dead-eyed children that return to Felix and Sol, in the extreme measures these parents take to protect their children, and in the even more extreme measures Sol takes when she must protect herself. Perversion of innocence and the destructiveness of sex—two of the devil’s favorite hobbies—recur throughout as well. The daughter’s disappearance (into an obvious vaginal cave) coincides with her first period, while her parents’ roadside tryst is laden with dirty talk about their own early sexual experiences. A maniac threatens to hack the two lesbians to death after sex, thus confirming Satan conforms to slasher movie standards (though one can argue that the genre’s tendency to punish sex is some puritanical, hellfire-and-brimstone shit in the first place).
It’s appropriate, then, that the rocky, arid wastelands looming in the distance is something of an anti-Eden, or, at the very least, the Garden by way of the Twilight Zone. From here, the devil operates and manipulates, spreading his influence and seemingly punishing women specifically. Every woman in the story is subjected to some sense of sexual shaming, with the daughter’s period essentially functioning as the inciting incident. Eve’s curse is literalized into a destructive burden that consumes everyone in the film. It feels a little unseemly and narrow-minded that the women here are indirectly responsible for Satan’s presence, but I wonder if that isn’t the point. In some ways, Here Comes the Devil confrontational in its insinuation that men can’t confront female sexuality without lashing out—Satan included, apparently.
Once Sol becomes the film’s anchor, it’s clear the film sympathizes with her. After his roundabout tour through various genres and subplots, Bogliano comes round to vaguely exploring institutionalized misogyny. While he doesn’t fully flesh these musings out and sometimes undercuts them with an over-reliance on the male gaze, he and Caro (making a remarkable feature film debut) paint a compelling figure in Sol, who is left to bear the burden of motherhood alone as her husband acquits himself to be quite the unfeeling dipshit. Her struggle leads her—and her family—to dark places; she must face figurative and literal abysses that continually spit her back out as a twisted shade of herself. For all its scattershot aim, Here Comes the Devil eventually focuses on familiar territory: the gradual, heartbreaking collapse of a woman meeting an evil that overwhelms her. Maybe it’s time we start wondering why the devil's hoofprints have settled into this path so often. Rent it!
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