
IFC Midnight
The Devil’s Candy (2017)
Directed by Sean Byrne
VOD Rating: Really Liked It
The Devil’s Candy sees Australian provocateur Sean Byrne fully coming into his own as a storyteller whose primary interests continue to aim towards the macabre. Evil forces pervade throughout Byrne’s latest film in ways that often veer towards the kind of morbidity made popular by Rob Zombie. The devil plays a central role in The Devil’s Candy, a satanic influence that can be keenly felt in the sheer terror that pervades throughout. But unlike House of 1000 Corpses or The Devil’s Rejects, Byrne spins a tale of demonic influences that never seeks to embrace its movie monster outright. Far from it, The Devil’s Candy builds its own scares in such a way that the viewer’s fascination with the evil contained therein proves self-reflective.
Crossing the intersection of genius and madness, Byrne seeks to find inspiration in the darkest parts of the human psyche, where a loss of control sometimes amounts to an artistic breakthrough. Unfortunately for central protagonist Jesse Hellman (Ethan Embry), whose slavish devotion to an unseen force of primordial malevolence threatens to consume him and his family whole, that kind of fiendish obsession can prove all too alluring. Byrne directs scenes of terror with a visual aestheticism unmatched by most of his contemporaries, and in The Devil’s Candy, viewers are offered what is perhaps the most significant 21st century genre film since Zombie burst onto the scene in 2003. Like Zombie, Byrne‘s latest is unsettling on a subconscious level, wherein narrative logic gives way to viscerally shocking imagery and implied ideas that become fleshed out via the co-operation between the director and his audience.
In order to perfect their very own iconic family portrait reminiscent of Grant Wood’s early 20th century American masterwork, Jesse (Embry) and Astrid Hellman (Shiri Appleby) decide to purchase a house in rural Texas. Enamored with their new abode’s rustic integrity and backwoods isolation, Jesse immediately begins to set up his art studio in a repurposed barn. The only thing that stands in his way is the history of the estate’s previous tenants – who were viciously slaughtered by their troubled son (Pruitt Taylor Vince) acting at the behest of the Devil himself. Soon enough, the voice of the Devil begins to torment Jesse, whose commissioned piece of domestic tranquility is quickly turned into a pictorial representation of demonic prophecy concerning the mortal soul of his young daughter Zooey (Kiara Glasco). Meanwhile, the troubled Ray Similie (Vince) makes his presence known and begins to commit the acts of murder that Jesse’s painting foretold.
Instead of devolving into the same kind of fatalism that so often plagues Zombie at his most heightened states of cinematic vitality, Byrne walks up to the same edge of moral depravity only to shock his audience into fully realizing the gross reality of his film’s transgressions. Unlike Zombie, Byrne manages to find a way out of the hellish furnace that he literally and figuratively places his characters into. Spiritually reminiscent of the late Tobe Hooper‘s cult-classic masterpiece The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, The Devil’s Candy reexamines the same regional well of inspiration only to find another movie monster possessed of a grotesque appetite for the human flesh, spirit, and soul. Following his debut film The Loved Ones from 2009, it will be exciting to see where Byrne will turn his attention next. Offering much more than the sum of its parts, The Devil’s Candy tells an American horror story that is ethereally tinged with a subtlety that often lends to frightening visions of presumed domesticity.
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The Devil’s Candy is currently available on Netflix, and is My Movies on VOD: Recommendation of the Week. This review is an abridged version of an article that was originally published by Film Inquiry.