Devil's Due (2014)

Devil's Due arrives in 2014 as a found-footage retelling of Rosemary's Baby, in which a honeymoon in the Dominican Republic ends with a satanic ritual, an unexpected pregnancy, and a young husband slowly realizing that his wife is carrying something other than a bundle of joy. The cameras are handheld, the marriage deteriorates, and a palm reader issues warnings nobody heeds. It is a film of modest ambitions and a D+ CinemaScore, which is the audience equivalent of a shrug performed in unison.

For our purposes, the ledger comes back empty. The cast is white, the pregnancy serves as a vessel for demonic forces, and the film makes no argument about the female body beyond a general revulsion at what it can host. There is no economic grievance, no environmental sermon, no reworking of the historical record. The Dominican setting supplies a taxi driver and a cult, both functioning as plot machinery. Nobody lectures. Nobody is asked to examine their assumptions. The film wants to scare you and then end, which it does with a cut to Paris and a suggestion that the cycle continues.

This is, in the taxonomy of cultural signifiers, a clean specimen. A horror film from 2014, arriving before such films began showing up with a thesis stapled to the press kit. There is something to admire in a movie that wants only to be Rosemary's Baby with a camcorder, and does not pretend otherwise. The critical consensus found it derivative. The cult following found it charming. Both parties agree on what it is, and neither has tried to claim it for anything larger.