Bury the Devil (2026) Review

Julia (Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez) is a hospice nurse whose latest job takes her to the remote homestead of dementia patient Evelyn (Dawn Ford). Initially, everything is as Julia would expect, with Evelyn wandering the house and apologising for her lack of short term memory. In short order matters take a worrying turn as Julia begins to suspect there’s something very wrong with Evelyn other than her degrading mental acuity. From her usual position of helping her patients leave this world with dignity, Julia faces the possibility that she could very well be the one about to die…

I very much enjoyed director Adam O’Brien’s previous movie Mom, which took a slew of haunted house tropes and applied a very different spin to them. Here, on the face of it, we’re presented with a story about the possession of a seemingly harmless old woman by a lethal demon which almost immediately places our protagonist in peril. There’s a house full of blind corners and tight stairways to creep around. There’s a tape recorder, the contents of which are not exactly a warm, nostalgia-filled mix of hits. Do you feel you’re in familiar, almost comforting genre territory?

Except you’re not. This particular tale of sigils and spirits goes for a real time, one take approach and even manages to ignore most of the accepted rulebook on how to film that type of action. Why use as few fancy and time consuming moves as possible when you can have the camera twirling and gliding around the property, going up, down, left, right, outside and inside, and unexpectedly picking up whichever character is next in line to push the proceedings along. The finely honed screenplay by Brad Hodson and John Petrizzi proves that, ahem, the devil really is in the detail, providing enough information to enlighten – or more often, confuse – Julia, and by definition, the viewer, as the carer’s night from Hell progressively becomes worse and worse.

It would have been easy to shoot this as a two hander which kicked its heels for the first seventy minutes before finally delivering something in the final ten, but Bury The Devil keeps the audience on its toes with regular chills and fun sidesteps in the plotting, bringing in other interested parties organically, playing with the idea that Julia could have been brought here on purpose but also leaning into the fact that she could very well just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Even the well worn idea of picking up the action at an especially dire moment and then jumping backwards to the beginning seems to have its own kind of freshness in this environment, with the caption “75 minutes ago” providing its own sense of urgency and sparking the question of just how things could possibly go that catastrophically badly in just an hour and a quarter? I had an idea about how it would reach that point and I’ll happily admit, in the very best way, that I was completely and utterly wrong.

In common with Mom, it’s the female performers who take centre stage with similarly effective results but unlike Emily Hampshire’s devastating psychological collapse in that previous outing, Emmanuelle Lussier Martinez and Dawn Ford are given license to tap into the more melodramatic elements of this more fantastical – but still somehow grounded and pervadingly doomy – journey into the unknown. The former has the requisite tragic backstory but doesn’t overplay it, the latter is served a number of delicious lines to tuck into as the malignant presence shows itself.

As strong as the script is, Bury The Devil never bogs itself down in talk. It is always moving, figuratively and literally. Pursuits, fights and gore are all on the menu, all adding to the technical nightmare this must have been to put together. Cinematographer Benoit Beaulieu deserves every plaudit going for not only solving what must have been myriad logistical issues associated with such a number of complex and chaotic sequences, but for giving the film such an impressive and atmospheric look.

With an intriguing history alluded to throughout, plus enough unanswered questions as to what may happen after the eventual fade to black, it’s easy to understand why Bury The Devil has been posited as the middle section of a trilogy. If the prequel and sequel can bring this level of innovation and imagination to the party, the whole saga could be enshrined as a high point in the possession subgenre.

Movie Rating:

Bury the Devil trailer