The Devil Is In Me (2026)
There is a good gag at the centre of Tia Salisbury's The Devil Is In Me, and a couple of genuinely funny moments scattered through it, but this surreal little period comedy never quite adds up to more than the sum of its odd parts. It is a diverting eleven minutes with a nice streak of darkness, yet I came away feeling it had promised more mischief than it ultimately delivered. Two and a half stars.
The setup is a lovely one. In late eighteenth-century England, a nightmarish teenager and a nervous, rookie Reverend lock horns over something as petty as Sunday school attendance, and the stand-off curdles into something stranger, a deadpan tug of war about religion, possession and who exactly has the devil in them. There is real promise in that premise, the clash of pious authority and adolescent menace, and when the film leans into its surreal, blackly comic instincts it works. A few beats landed properly, and you can see the sharp little horror-comedy it is reaching to be.
The trouble is that it does not reach it often enough. For all its cleverness the whole thing feels slight, over almost before it has built any momentum, and its eleven minutes pass without the premise ever paying off as fully as it might. The humour is hit and miss, funny in patches but never quite sustained, and the surreal flourishes end up feeling more like decoration than a coherent vision.
My biggest gripe is the music. The score sits oddly against the period setting, pulling against the eighteenth-century world rather than heightening it, and instead of sharpening the surrealism it kept yanking me out of the film. I suspect the mismatch was deliberate, a knowing anachronism, but for me it did not come off, and it left the whole piece feeling tonally unsettled in a way that worked against the comedy rather than for it.
Two and a half stars. The Devil Is In Me has a strong idea, a game sense of the absurd and a handful of laughs, and Salisbury clearly has a feel for this kind of macabre whimsy. It simply does not quite come together, held back by its brevity, its uneven humour and a soundtrack at war with its own setting. A near miss rather than a dud, and worth a look if offbeat period comedy is your thing, but not one I can push much harder than that.
The Devil Is In Me screens at the BFI London Film Festival.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country United Kingdom: The Driver (1978), Interstellar (2014), The Dark Knight (2008)
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