This elevator is hell-bound

After the critical thrashing of his last three films M. Night Shyamalan, Oscar-nominated for 1999's blockbuster "The Sixth Sense," needs to lift his reputation. "Devil," the first in a trio of chillers executive-produced by Shyamalan, collectively called The Night Chronicles, is not the prestige-restoring hit he was hoping for.

Though it's written by Brian Nelson ("30 Days of Night") and directed and produced by St. Paul's movie-making siblings John Erick Dowdle and his brother Drew ("Outbreak"), "Devil" is billed as "From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan." It's from precisely the corner of his imagination that created "Signs," his last successful film. Once again we get a central character whose belief in God is tested by a family-killing traffic accident, then restored in a battle against otherworldly evil. This time, instead of aliens in a cornfield, it's Satan in an elevator.

The film opens with standard helicopter flyover images of Philadelphia skyscrapers flipped upside down, creating a striking sense of dystopian dread. The eerie mood continues through a scene of roof-jumping suicide, framed and filmed so matter-of-factly that the bad omen becomes a startling joke. That self-destructive gesture of lost faith allows Satan to assume human form and torture some lost souls before claiming them. According to the folktales of the film's Latino narrator, that's how he rolls.

Trapped midway up a skyscraper elevator shaft, the doomed include a businessman, a blue collar guy, a snippy old lady, a roughneck rent-a-cop and an affluent beauty. They have nothing in common and begin bickering the moment the lift stalls. When a police detective investigating the jumper's suicide commandeers the rescue operation, observing the passengers via closed-circuit TV, he finds that each has damning secrets.

Then they begin dying in grisly, inexplicable ways, and a crucifix-fondling security guard insists that supernatural forces are at work. The bereaved recovering-alcoholic detective is fighting his own demons. He doesn't believe in higher powers -- his wife and child died in a hit-and-run, so how can there be a God? -- and the story becomes as much a conversion parable as a horror thriller.

The Dowdles skillfully exploit the possibilities of a claustrophobic confined space, wringing tension from failing lights, frightening noises, flashes of gore and half-seen boogeyman images. The tone never erupts into blind panic, however. Nelson's script wobbles, with a laughable scene of the superstitious security guard proving Satan's presence with a slice of toast. Look for that one to become a viral video by the end of the week. Worst of all, the devil's choice of victims suggests that on this mission to Earth, he's slumming. Surely there are worse people in that very skyscraper. If Satan had any ambition, he'd have taken possession of a hedge fund's executive washroom.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186