Caminando con el Diablo
Some thrillers live on mystery, while others depend on making the setting feel capable of swallowing their characters. The Devil Within belongs more to the second group. Its 1980s rural Spain is not merely a backdrop: empty roads, heat, dust, silence and isolated spaces create a sense of confinement that carries much of a fairly recognizable story.
Rubén Pérez-Barrena brings together two families marked by difficult circumstances and turns that encounter into a story of crime, disappearance, guilt and violence. There is little attempt to reinvent the rural thriller. Many of its pieces feel familiar and, if you have seen enough films of this kind, some directions become visible before the movie reaches them. Still, the narrative has enough tension to keep that predictability from sinking it.
That explains my reaction quite well: it is perfectly watchable. I did not find it extraordinary or especially original, but neither did it feel like a failure. It has craft, a compact running time and an atmosphere strong enough to keep you watching even when the road ahead begins to look familiar.
Tamar Novas and Marina Salas probably give the film most of its personality. Both work from a kind of uncomfortable intensity without turning their characters into caricatures. Fear, resentment, pain and emotional violence are present even when nothing explicit is happening. The film works best when it trusts them and allows looks and silences to do part of the work.
Iván Marcos also fits this world very well. He has a presence that can suggest normality and unease at the same time, which is especially useful in a story where it is rarely wise to assume we fully know anyone. The cast as a whole maintains the dry tone the film needs and prevents it from turning into excessive melodrama.
The cinematography is another strength. Open landscapes do not offer freedom but the opposite. The emptier the surroundings become, the more isolated the characters feel. That contradiction is used effectively: there is a huge amount of space around them, yet the sensation is that there is nowhere to go. Sunlight, roads and bare land replace the dark corridors of a more conventional thriller.
I also appreciate that the film does not pretend to be something it is not. It is not chasing a giant intellectual puzzle or complicated mythology. This is rural crime, secrets, violence and damaged people making bad decisions. That simplicity can feel limiting, but it also lets the story move with clarity.
The problem is that the same clarity reduces surprise. There are moments when the screenplay seems to prepare a blow that the viewer has already started to anticipate. The twists work more because of their harshness than because they are genuinely unexpected. When a suspense film allows the audience to reach certain conclusions before it does, some of the tension inevitably disappears.
Not every conflict has the same depth either. Some motivations are well built, while others seem to exist mainly to push the story toward its next confrontation. The film clearly wants to explore guilt, grief and the way pain can distort a person, but it does not always go as deep as those ideas promise.
Even so, the tone keeps it from becoming completely routine. There is an effective dryness to the film, moments of violence that are not designed to look elegant, and a constant sense that any fragile balance may suddenly break. Pérez-Barrena's debut shows visual control and knows how to use locations to create unease without relying constantly on tricks.
What it lacks most may be a truly individual personality. Its best elements recall other Spanish rural thrillers: closed communities, a past that weighs heavily, morally damaged characters and an indifferent landscape watching everything. Those ingredients are assembled competently here, but they rarely take a form that feels as though it could belong only to this film.
The Devil Within ultimately remains in a fairly comfortable middle ground: entertaining, harsh and tense enough, but also predictable and somewhat generic. I do not regret watching it, and across its compact running time it holds attention. It simply leaves me with the feeling of having seen a competent rural thriller rather than discovering something genuinely new. For an evening of crime, abduction and damaged people lost in the middle of nowhere, it does the job.
Rubén Pérez-Barrena brings together two families marked by difficult circumstances and turns that encounter into a story of crime, disappearance, guilt and violence. There is little attempt to reinvent the rural thriller. Many of its pieces feel familiar and, if you have seen enough films of this kind, some directions become visible before the movie reaches them. Still, the narrative has enough tension to keep that predictability from sinking it.
That explains my reaction quite well: it is perfectly watchable. I did not find it extraordinary or especially original, but neither did it feel like a failure. It has craft, a compact running time and an atmosphere strong enough to keep you watching even when the road ahead begins to look familiar.
Tamar Novas and Marina Salas probably give the film most of its personality. Both work from a kind of uncomfortable intensity without turning their characters into caricatures. Fear, resentment, pain and emotional violence are present even when nothing explicit is happening. The film works best when it trusts them and allows looks and silences to do part of the work.
Iván Marcos also fits this world very well. He has a presence that can suggest normality and unease at the same time, which is especially useful in a story where it is rarely wise to assume we fully know anyone. The cast as a whole maintains the dry tone the film needs and prevents it from turning into excessive melodrama.
The cinematography is another strength. Open landscapes do not offer freedom but the opposite. The emptier the surroundings become, the more isolated the characters feel. That contradiction is used effectively: there is a huge amount of space around them, yet the sensation is that there is nowhere to go. Sunlight, roads and bare land replace the dark corridors of a more conventional thriller.
I also appreciate that the film does not pretend to be something it is not. It is not chasing a giant intellectual puzzle or complicated mythology. This is rural crime, secrets, violence and damaged people making bad decisions. That simplicity can feel limiting, but it also lets the story move with clarity.
The problem is that the same clarity reduces surprise. There are moments when the screenplay seems to prepare a blow that the viewer has already started to anticipate. The twists work more because of their harshness than because they are genuinely unexpected. When a suspense film allows the audience to reach certain conclusions before it does, some of the tension inevitably disappears.
Not every conflict has the same depth either. Some motivations are well built, while others seem to exist mainly to push the story toward its next confrontation. The film clearly wants to explore guilt, grief and the way pain can distort a person, but it does not always go as deep as those ideas promise.
Even so, the tone keeps it from becoming completely routine. There is an effective dryness to the film, moments of violence that are not designed to look elegant, and a constant sense that any fragile balance may suddenly break. Pérez-Barrena's debut shows visual control and knows how to use locations to create unease without relying constantly on tricks.
What it lacks most may be a truly individual personality. Its best elements recall other Spanish rural thrillers: closed communities, a past that weighs heavily, morally damaged characters and an indifferent landscape watching everything. Those ingredients are assembled competently here, but they rarely take a form that feels as though it could belong only to this film.
The Devil Within ultimately remains in a fairly comfortable middle ground: entertaining, harsh and tense enough, but also predictable and somewhat generic. I do not regret watching it, and across its compact running time it holds attention. It simply leaves me with the feeling of having seen a competent rural thriller rather than discovering something genuinely new. For an evening of crime, abduction and damaged people lost in the middle of nowhere, it does the job.
Mini Review: Some thrillers live on mystery, while others depend on making the setting feel capable of swallowing their characters. The Devil Within belongs more to the second group. Its 1980s rural Spain is not merely a backdrop: empty roads, heat, dust, silence and isolated spaces create a sense of confinement that carries much of a fairly recognizable story. Rubén Pérez-Barrena brings together two families marked by difficult circumstances and turns that e...
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