I recently saw the movie Late night with the devil (2023), and these are my notes about it. This isn't a review, it's really just so I remember what the movie was about 3 months from now. This post does contain spoilers. Cutting to the chase: Late night with the devil has some good ideas and some strong moments, but it implodes underneath its over-complex conceits and storytelling gimmicks.
Late night with the devil is an alternate history about a late night talk show host of the 1970s named Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian), who features a daemonic possession on his show in a desparate bid for improved ratings. The movie opens with a little documentary segment about Jack Delroy and his struggle in competing with the leading [real life] talk show host Johnny Carson, and then transitions to a complete replay of the "lost" episode featuring an actual daemonic possession.
The episode was recorded as the annual Halloween episode, so occultism is a believable running theme. Because the movie consists mostly of the lost episode along with the behind-the-scenes footage recorded during commercial breaks, the plot unfolds in real-time. And there's a lot of strong setup.
The first guest is a medium with a fake accent who ends his act with an apparently real emotional breakdown. Or was that just part of the act? Or was it something Jack Delroy engineered or commissioned to boost ratings?
Then a skeptic called Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss) comes on and demonstrates how the medium's act was manufactured.
The final guest is Lilly (Ingrid Torelli), a 13 year old girl rescued from a Satanic cult and now in the custody of para-psychologist Dr. June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon). The doctor is coerced on air to summon the daemon Abraxas, who lives within the girl. There's a really tame daemonic possession scene, which upsets everybody but of course instantly boosts ratings.
But then the skeptic steps forward and, with a volunteer from the show's cast, demonstrates how every part of the possession was entirely faked through mass hypnosis. He performs an act of his own, withh some gruesome scenes [finally], and then has Jack play the footage back. What actually happened is completely different than what the audience (including us) "think" happened. It's a really clever moment, and shifts the entire narrative. All of a sudden, as if waking from hypnosis yourself, you realise that the implication is that the doctor is using mass hypnosis to convince us and the girl herself that Lilly is possessed by a daemon. What a twist!
Except it's not a twist. Actually the tame possession scene did happen, and backed into a corner the daemon emerges within Lilly, splits her head open in an unintentionally hilarious climax, and zaps or melts all the meanies who doubted the daemon.
Squandered plot twist aside, Late night with the devil gets tricked by its own storytelling illusion. Starting out as a documentary that cuts to lost footage is a neat variation on the found-footage movement that started with Blair Witch.
As a former film nerd myself, the behind-the-scenes footage threw me out of the movie because I'd have expected the footage to be static shots from studio cameras. Instead, all of the behind-the-scenes footage is cinema verité, as if a camera operator suddenly dismounted a studio camera and started following people around for no reason. No wait, not just one studio camera operator, but all of them, because the footage cuts from one group of people to another, as if there were lots of hand-held cameras floating around the busy set and then the footage was edited together. As found onset footage, this makes absolutely no sense, but I'm willing to concede that maybe the vast majority of viewers wouldn't notice that. I don't know how people think TV shows are shot, or were shot back in the 1970s, so maybe they wouldn't notice.
The next serious problem, though, is that the movie abandons all attempts of justifying what we're seeing during the 3rd act. Jack Delroy is, I guess, thrust into a time warp by Abraxas, and is forced to relive key moments of his rise to fame. But he's aware that he's out of Time, so we see footage from the opening documentary but with "new" Jack acting confused and disoriented. That's fine, but why are we seeing it? What is this footage meant to be?
To top it all off, one of the title cards distorts. I guess it's supposed to represent that reality is breaking down, but all it actually does is make us painfully aware that everything on screen are just some digital files on an video editor's computer, and that video editor has a pack of plugins that were too expensive not to use.
Well, the acting was good all round.
Daemonic possession isn't actually a genre of horror that I tend to enjoy, so maybe I wasn't the target audience for this. But I did like the concept of this movie, I just couldn't accept its execution. I think the script was probably very strong at some early iteration, but I do wonder whether it got revised a few too many times. The hints that Jack Delroy could have dealt with Abraxas before, as part of his rise to fame in the first place, were perfectly subtle until the 3rd act when everything's is spelled out in those out of place flashbacks. The hints that the doctor could be manipulating an already abused child were perfectly evil until a daemon pops out of Lilly's head. And the live on-air possession scene is literally upstaged by the skeptic's illusion, which I think works perfectly as the surprise twist, but the effect is entirely negated by the "climactic" re-possession when the daemon comically zaps people in horror scenes that are themselves outdone by actual horror movies from the 1970s.
This is not a movie I'd watch again.
Lead photo by Anika De Klerk on Unsplash