Satan Wants You and Devils are screening as part of the Fantasia International Film Festival, which runs from July 20 to August 9.

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Devils

Kim Jae-hoon’s Devils is a crime thriller with a premise similar to that of a body swap movie. Police detective Jae-hwan (Oh Dae-hwan) disappears for a month after pursuing a sadistic serial killer (Jang Dong-yoon), only for both the cop and the killer to resurface unexpectedly. Jae-hwan wakes in a hospital to find himself handcuffed to his bed. He is confused, until he sees his face in the mirror, and it is the killer’s face staring back at him. To stop the cold-blooded murderer who now walks in his body, Jae-hwan must convince his young partner of his true identity, escape police custody, and solve the murder case before his family’s life is endangered.

Once it finds the right groove in its premise, Devils is a satisfying experiment with the crime genre. By taking the body swapping mechanic seriously, the film builds adequate tension in the acts of infiltration that both parties engage in. Jae-hwan uses his new face to gain information about the murders from the killer’s connections. Jin-hyuk, the killer, establishes himself in Jae-hwan’s home, where the detective’s wife and daughter are none the wiser as to who they are really eating their dinners with.

Even with the intrigue of the premise, the film struggles to maintain a pace that would keep a crime thriller exciting from start to finish. The characters introduced within the criminal operation, who kill people and put video of the deaths on the dark web, are uninspired and unmemorable. Watching Jae-hwan interact with them in turn becomes something of a chore, and during this stretch of the film Jin-hyuk remains largely absent. Given Jin-hyuk is the central threat and that this is a body swap film, it is odd that he remains inactive for such a long time.

The film leads itself slowly toward a major misdirection, which is revealed in flashback late in the film. It is a vaguely intriguing conceptual move, but its late entrance gives little runway to work with in exploring what is occurring between the killer and the cop. When the film reaches its high stakes final moments, it feels as though there was more the story could have unpacked in lieu of the muddled plot it does traverse.

Devils: C+

Satan Wants You

Satan Wants You details how the 1980 publication of sensational book Michelle Remembers sparked the “Satanic Panic” moment. The book, written by Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, relied on the questionable practice of recovered memory therapy. These sessions produced what Michelle and Pazder believed to be memories of abuse against Michelle at the hands of satanists when she was a child.

Despite the questionable tactics, the book became a hit. Smith and Pazder made media appearances, fueling a fear over satanists hiding in the shadows and kidnapping children for ritualistic abuse. Police investigations into alleged satanic cults even began using the book as something of a training manual.

Satan Wants You focuses on Michelle Remembers, its two authors, and the ripples of media coverage that came from the publication of the book. Interviews with family members, FBI agents, and experts attempt to contextualize how the media-induced hysteria came to be.

The documentary is a good primer on the conditions that created a media circus. Those unfamiliar with the satanic panic will receive an easily digestible history lesson. Grounding the scope of the film to Michelle Remembers and its fallout allows for a perspective on the panic that avoids backwards-looking gawking. Instead, the film attempts to understand why people were willing to believe stories like Michelle’s and get caught up in the paranoia. It is far from exhaustive, but it covers the ground it does tread well.

Satan Wants You: B-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Twitter, Letterboxd, Facebook)