Five strangers are trapped in a lift where one of them is the actual Devil, in this M. Night Shyamalan-produced thriller they should have called Hellevator.

Shyamalan opted not to direct this 2010 Jesus Creeper, presumably because there was no way it would further his kids‘ careers. It was meant to be the first instalment in a trilogy called The Night Chronicles, which Shyamalan would produce alongside different directors. But the project was abandoned after Devil, possibly due to its arriving shortly after Shyamalan’s infamous The Last Airbender, which flopped so badly it forced the studio to cancel two planned sequels. So The Last Airbender could actually be responsible for aborting two separate trilogies.

Or it was simply that Devil itself is a failed experiment, unable to translate from the beermat where Shyamalan scrawled the half-baked idea onto the big screen. His story is stuck between Hitchcockian naturalism and supernatural bulldozing that destroys the logic required of a locked-room thriller. The plot has twists revealing information about the characters’ relationships and their criminal pasts, but these are all meaningless as the villain is Satan himself, and therefore completely unconstrained by the enclosed setting or the revelations of its characters.

When the lift gets stuck, no one thinks to call the fire department or the elevator company until one of them is murdered. At this point a cop (Chris Messina) shows up, five years after his family was killed on Bethlehem Pike (do you see what he did there?). Meanwhile one of the security guards is convinced they are witnessing devilry because he’s hispanic, and Shyamalan tells us we’re dealing with the literal Devil from the title onwards. So rather than mining the lift shaft for suspense, he simply lectures us about religion and redemption for 80 minutes, while suggesting the characters basically deserve to die because they’re criminals.

He throws in the usual scary old lady and twist ending, but the only frightening revelation is that you’ve wound up stuck in a lift with M. Night Shyamalan. Hell.