When a South Korean teenage girl, So-Mi (Re Lee), dies after an exorcism, supernatural occurrences plague the three-day funeral. Surgeon and mourning father, Seung-do Cha (Shin-yang Park), believes that she is alive, and an exorcist, Father Ban (Min-ki Lee), believes that if she is, it will mean a greater evil will emerge in three days like Jesus’ resurrection. The two men are at odds with each other, but will they eventually team up and do what is right for the greater good?
If you have seen one little girl possessed, you have seen them all. So-Mi starts off as a sweet, sick girl who loves spending time with her father to becoming a homicidal maniac rather than a foul mouthed, pea soup spitting kid. The real troublemaker is Dad who keeps causing scenes whether it is during the exorcism or the funeral. “Devil’s Stay” is about how Seung-do is willing to do anything for his daughter which leads to compromises in his personal and professional lives. It turns out that he may have done some questionable things to make his daughter better and make her vulnerable to possession.
“Devil’s Stay” is not just a possession movie, but organ transplant horror where the organ’s original owner lives on its host. Technically Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” is the first of this genre. Seung-do is a mad scientist or doctor, but because love of his daughter instead of ambition motivates his actions, he gets to still be sympathetic—have his cake and eat it too. If more time was devoted to this part of the plot, it may have made the story stronger, but because the filmmakers are committed to keeping Dad likeable, it shies away from diving into innate callousness and depravity of his actions.
“Devil’s Stay” still does not work however because the rest of the Cha family is just window dressing. He has a young son who also witnesses the phenomenon and keeps suffering from nose bleeds—it goes nowhere, and he could have been written out of the plot, but then there would not be a plausible reason for Cha’s wife to play such a minor role. His wife is almost a noncharacter who exists to toggle between hugging their son and trying to hold back her husband. There is an understandably obnoxious guard dog grandma who ensures that the funeral is three days and follows appropriate standards, which of course makes everything worse. If she had just let the cremation happen, there would not be a movie, and she conveniently passes out instead of having to react to the consequences of her actions.
Weird things continuously happen with no long-term consequence within the story onscreen. One-character bashes his head in then there is a moth infestation. Other than the main characters, it bothers the supporting cast enough to scream in shock but then they move on as if they suffer from “Memento” style amnesia. An exterminator does not even make an appearance. Everyone suffers from baffling under reactions. How can there be so many people, and no one talks about any scare longer than a few moments, which is contrary to how the funeral goes on the first day when everyone gossips about the details surrounding So-Mi’s death. One repairman drops his WD-40, which is a nice, embedded ad, never to be seen again after the morgue starts rumbling. At least some seismologists should have turned up. It is as if the filmmakers just thought that throwing enough horror ingredients would make a good movie: levitation, moths, burn victims, tattooed white men, bleeding orifices, etc. Yeah, no. That list could be a brief “American Horror Story” montage on a bad day.
Father Ban is the only character permitted to have an extended reaction. South Korean media is the last bastion of hot priest content, and generally they kick ass. This controversial exorcist is responsible for explaining the lore around the demon possession mythology. If you are an American or a Western based consumer of demon possession movies, South Korean movies about demon possession usually feel as if something got lost in translation from our lore to theirs so it is close enough to feel familiar but different enough to not feel like a cohesive whole and seem off kilter. Turns out that Father Ban has personal experience with demons, but instead of enhancing the story, it feels like a distraction. The connection to this demon is tenuous. The Russian Orthodox Church gets a reference—points for originality instead of the Roman Catholic Church, but um, that creative choice unintentionally opens a whole can of worms—see Andrey Zvyagintsev’s “Leviathan” (2014). Sadly “Devil’s Stay” leaves the shamans out of the fun.
It feels like a missed opportunity that “Devil’s Stay” did not treat the demon possession as an anti-Christ story, but instead, another demon of lower rank than Lucifer. Bariel is the demon responsible for destroying the Cha family, and Bariel has no distinct personality. Pazuzu from “The Exorcist” (1973) would be recognizable in any vessel. Paimon did not get his start in “Hereditary” (2018), and while he has a more mysterious psychological profile distinguished from his human host du jour, at least his followers know how to put on a show. One bad mom is the head of Bariel’s coven of women who are trying to bring their personal demon to this dimension. Bad mom gets one scene to chew the scenery, and if she had stuck around longer, maybe Bariel would have seem less like a poorly thought-out concept.
Up to her appearance, the present day is intercut with flashbacks so the timing of the father meeting her is initially unclear, but it is the present day. It could have been cooler to let him intentionally strike a deal with the devil. Because of all the jump scare bells and whistles surrounding the story, the mythology fails to feel credible on the paranormal plane. By the denouement, the story shifts again with a M. Night Shyamalan-esque twist more like an eye-rolling shell game reminiscent of how “The Walking Dead” treated Glenn’s little dumpster dive. It is an unearned, eleventh-hour cheat unworthy of rewinding and pausing to review the revised earlier scenes that are rapidly edited into the present day. Booooooo.
It is possible that “Devil’s Stay” intended to use Seung-do as a Jesus figure who is willing to sacrifice every aspect of his life for his daughter. It feels more like instinctual patriarchy with women ranging from being useless victims to utterly horrible. There are nuns who escape relatively unscathed who play no substantial role. By the end of “Devil’s Stay,” people live and die, but it does not feel as if there is any character development. Everyone is who they were at the start of this journey.
South Korean movies are generally better than the average American film, especially horror, but “Devil’s Stay” (2024) is the exception to the rule. Hyun Moon-Sub is making his feature film debut and though the production quality and acting is top notch, even with a new mythology, the story does not do enough to distinguish itself from other demonic possession films. Other than a couple of excellent oneiric sequences, it is a complete waste of time and disappointment. Watch “Exhuma” (2024) or “The Wailing” (2016) instead.
