Late Night With The Devil Review: Found Footage Feels Fresh Again In Thrilling Horror Movie

Late Night with the Devil should feel familiar. Horror relies on familiar forms perhaps more than most genres, to the extent that when I say this movie is a combination of possession, occult, and found-footage, you can already picture it pretty clearly. And you wouldn’t be off, exactly. But one of the great things about horror is that it’s familiar until it suddenly isn’t. No matter how stale a scenario or monster or format seems, through the right filmmaker’s lens, it can feel like invention.

If it doesn’t quite make what’s old feel new again, Late Night with the Devil gets excitingly close. Cameron and Colin Cairnes, the Australian siblings who wrote, directed, and edited this film together, have carefully crafted our journey through its 93-minute runtime. They’ve laid a fun, scary premise over a character-driven drama about a talk show host desperate to emerge from Johnny Carson’s shadow, and wrapped that in the immersive specificity of their ’70s-footage framework. It’s easy to imagine a version of this film without the horror elements being just as compelling.

Late Night With The Devil Remembers To Be A Good Movie

The horror hits harder when the drama delivers

That’s a decided strength, and something that might’ve tripped up other movies with a similar structure. The first few minutes fill us in on the context, documentary-style, and promise the long-lost master tape we’re about to see builds to something truly shocking. Our desire for payoff is virtually guaranteed to keep our attention from then on. A lesser film might’ve coasted on that, devoting all its resources to drip-feeding us clues. This one, even if it does drop us the occasional puzzle piece, lets no moment be uninteresting.

It’s hard to single anything out to credit for that, because everything works so well in concert, but arguably the most important factor is the way Late Night with the Devil handles the talk show’s commercial breaks. The behind-the-scenes footage of these brief stretches between segments, in which host Jack Delroy (David Dastmalchian) talks to his sidekick Gus (Rhys Auteri), his bullish producer Leo Fiske (Josh Quong Tart), and various guests, create a wonderful tension between reality and performance. The dialogue and acting quickly establish layers to each relationship that then simmer beneath the characters’ on-camera exchanges.

These scenes are when Dastmalchian really gets to shine. Jack has an easy, slick stage presence and a range of emotions hidden underneath, but unlike the other characters, there’s a falseness to him that never quite falls away. He’s different with the cameras off, but not in the way you’d expect from someone in a make-or-break situation. His emotions flicker over an odd calmness; his behavior is mutable in a way that feels manipulative. It’s a performance that proves the Cairneses were right to cast Dastmalchian as their movie’s fulcrum.

Everything In Late Night With The Devil Serves The Scares

And the climax earns all that buildup

I don’t highlight Late Night with the Devil‘s strong foundation to suggest horror comes second for it — quite the opposite. It’s easy to just enjoy the ride of this movie, but look back at it more critically, and you’ll see how every creative choice was designed to set, manage, meet, and subvert our expectations for the finale. Subgenres are winkingly signposted. When supposedly possessed cult survivor Lilly (Ingrid Torrelli) is introduced with Dr. June Ross-Mitchell, her parapsychologist handler, we have an idea where things will go. The ’70s aesthetic also sets expectations for how it will look, effects-wise.

But the question really driving us (and, indeed, the fictional documentary we’re watching) is, what actually happened that night? As an audience, we go in wanting to see; the film makes us want to understand. The performance-reality question explored in the character work bleeds over to the plot, and the directors sow doubt all across the movie. Firstly, though the fact that we’re watching a horror movie inclines us to believe in the supernatural, the found-footage device is embraced so fully that Late Night with the Devil always keeps one foot in the real world.

Secondly, the characters are uncertain of what to believe. Though Delroy invites Lilly, June, and the celebrity medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi) on his show, he also brings in Carmichael Haig (Ian Bliss) as the voice of skepticism. The magician-turned-debunker, though antagonistic, pokes holes in what we might otherwise just accept, and the film doesn’t reduce him to the arrogant non-believer destined to get his just deserts. His opportunity to respond to a chilling display from Lilly is when the film starts to levitate.

Late Night with the Devil‘s ending capitalizes on all that groundwork and goodwill. It’s narratively satisfying, resolving an arc for Jack that is developed more subtly throughout, and channels its inevitable wildness into some pretty creative images. The directors do allow themselves some freedom from their conceit to achieve their finale, and part of me would’ve liked to see what they would’ve done with the formal rigor of something like Lake Mungo, which lingers in large part because the faux-documentary element is never abandoned.

But their choice works, especially for the tone they’re chasing, so I can’t judge them too harshly. Late Night with the Devil is tremendously fun. It should be watched after dark, and with some kind of audience – it’s the kind of horror movie that would play just as well, maybe better, with a group of friends huddled around the TV as in a crowded theater.