In previous reviews on this blog, I've made references to the Three Act Structure, which is a model used in screenwriting that divides the narrative into - obviously - three parts. I found myself thinking a lot about this model while watching today's movie, Inner Demons, and so I figured I'd use the Three Act Structure in my review to explain what the film did right and the one point it did very wrong. There may therefore be SPOILERS in this review as it goes along.
The setup of Inner Demons is that we're watching the "raw" footage from a TV show - this one is effectively that Intervention reality TV show, where they follow an addict of some sort around, get to know them and their family and friends, then spring a surprise "intervention" on them to try to get them to accept help and go into rehab (I may have watched an episode or two). So our addict in this case is a teenage girl called Carson, who used to be a straight-A, good Christian girl who once won an award for memorizing the entire Bible, but who's now a surly goth addicted to heroin, oxycontin and the like. We also meet her parents - quiet, Bible-believing mother and repressed-anger-through-drinking father - and her best friend McKee, as well as the crew filming the whole thing. Two of them are unpleasant ratings-grabbers, wanting to do nothing more than exploit the family for ratings, and the third, Jason, is new to the job and instantly starts feeling sympathetic to Carson. So this is Act One, where everything is set up - we meet all our protagonists and antagonists and start to get the story rolling on just what is happening. Carson doesn't seem to know - or is unwilling to tell - why she's become addicted to drugs, but the movie starts to drop a couple of vague hints our way - books on demonology and possession in Carson's room and Carson developing a dual-tone voice when she is angry and/or coming down from her highs.
Act Two begins when Carson arrives at rehab and starts the detox process, and the tension mounts as we start to realise that Carson's not just a normal drug addict with problems. This is also the point in the film, incidentally, where Inner Demons reveals itself to be kind of a modern, hipster version of The Exorcist - at one point Carson abruptly projectile vomits on her mother while praying, and a group therapy session turns nasty when she starts telling the other patients (in her dual-tone voice) personal things that she shouldn't know. Sadly this latter scene turned out to be more hilarious for me than shocking, as when Carson snarls at one patient that "Tina misses you in hell," I automatically responded, "Yes, but is she sucking cocks there?" Maybe the filmmakers should have played that a little more subtle; maybe I'm just a terrible person. It could go either way. Regardless, this is when we start to realise, through the audience surrogate Jason, what is actually going on - that Carson is somehow possessed, and that her drug-taking is in fact an attempt to stop the demon from taking over. She's effectively damning herself to keep the demon in check, and as original ideas go, it's a good one.
Act Three is, of course, our climax, and the resolution of all our dangling plot threads. After he gets her kicked out of rehab and himself fired, Jason starts his own investigation/stalking Carson in an attempt to save her. He discovers the circumstances that led to Carson being possessed, downloads an exorcism ritual from the internet, and heads off to her house to save the day. And it's at this point that the film makes its biggest mistake. In the middle of the climactic scenes of exorcism and demons gone wild, Carson's mother suddenly drops a plot point that really should have been revealed back in Act Two - Carson is violent and unstable because she's abused. There seems to be no other reason to bring this up other than to throw doubt on the idea that she could be possessed - so why wait until now, where we've seen her vomit blood from drinking holy water, bilocate, have her reflection take on a life of her own and the other stuff mentioned above? It's not going to change anything with ten minutes left to go in the film. If it had been brought up in Act Two, it would have added an interesting twist of doubt to the whole thing - is Carson really possessed, or is she just very disturbed and very manipulative? Instead, it feels awkward and anticlimactic, and ultimately doesn't matter anyway.
So that's why the timing of plot point revelations are important.
Overall though, I quite liked Inner Demons. It was a found-footage movie that didn't go the route of "lost footage from a ghost hunting show!" and its ideas regarding drug addiction and demonic possession were refreshingly original. Granted, most of the characters were so unpleasant I was rooting for Carson and the demon for most of the film, but that's hardly a bad thing. If I were to point out any other flaws, they would be that a lot of the sub-plot of Carson and Jason felt awfully similar to The Quiet Ones, but I guess that's because it's more of a trope than anything else.
Amazon UK (Region 1)
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