Bedevil (1993) User Reviews

Wow!

[BandSAboutMovies · 7/10 · 9 August 2021]

The first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman - Tracey Moffatt, who also made Lip, a mashup of black servants in Hollywood movies talking back to their bosses - BeDevil was inspired by the director's childhood.

The first story "Mr. Chuck" is about an Australian boy haunted by the spirit of a drowned American soldier, with the experience seen through the eyes of the boy as a man looking back on his youth and a white woman whose family colonzied Australia. And it's presented as a series of documentary interviews, heightening the strangeness of it all.

In "Choo Choo Choo Choo, Moffat plays a character who might even be herself as a train continues to haunt a family as it runs on invisible tracks through Queensland, even decades later.

The last story is "Lovin' the Spin I'm In," during which a doomed couple tries to leave their community behind to escape racism, their death ends up trapping them in an eternal dance.

BeDevil has been compared to Kwaidan and that's an apt comparison. It feels like it came from a darker world than our own to explain and help us get past the darkness in our own place. Please try and seek it out, as it's an amazing film.

Unusual and groundbreaking

[PeterM27 · 6/10 · 17 November 2021]

Tracy Moffatt is an Aboriginal visual artist, and her film is an impressionist artwork, as well as a collection of three stories. She tells three stories about different groups of Aboriginal people and Whites, set in a surreal, stage-set version of Queensland, with pastel colours suffused with nostalgia. All the stories involve the supernatural, with strange inexplicable forces inhabiting certain places.

In the first story concerns a young Aboriginal boy, who is dragged into a swamp by a strange creature. He escapes but remains haunted by the experience. Later on, a white family build a cinema over the swamp, where an American GI drowned in the war.

The second story concerns a family who live beside a railway track, where a ghost train runs, and the ghost of a blind girl, killed by a train, wanders.

The third story concerns a Greek family who live in North Queensland, and a couple of young Torres Strait islanders who die mysteriously and whose ghosts dance in the house opposite.

All three stories were shot in a studio, though the film includes some shots from other parts of Queensland. This was the first feature film by an Aboriginal woman director, and is interesting, although the stories are very mannered, oblique and even absurdist.

Far from my cup of tea

[DanTheMan2150AD · 6/10 · 22 December 2023]

Highly stylised, hyper-imaginary, hyper-real. There's no denying what beDevil represents, challenging the racial stereotypes of Australian society, creating and sharing stories to make sense of the world, while encouraging and reflecting on connections between the past and the present, people and places. It's an anthology of modern folklore horror sold purely on its constant tonal shifts, visual experimentation and being the first feature directed by an Australian Aboriginal woman, giving prominent roles to Aboriginal people. It's a surreal experience and one that highlights a personal mythology of Tracey Moffat, often feeling like an impressionist painting come to life, far from my cup of tea but one of immense intrigue.

avant gard and popular style in one

[lechatalemot · 9/10 · 11 July 2004]

In the best style of the supernatural stories of the television sixties Tracey Moffatt give us avant gard cinematography making a stylized Australian outback mixed between real things and sets with a very beautiful and dramatical photography full of irony, humour ,suspense and tragedy; she made a very unusual films and as always with this kind of films is very hard to accept the new reality that the director propose, then after the mixed feelings regular moviegoers but just of the regular cinema that always told the same story and in the same style never creating a new world, probably could be disappointed, if you think cinema is an adventure and the approximation to new cosmovisions and of course poetry and beauty, then this is a film for you.

A Beautifully Created Australian Film

[ladymidath · 10/10 · 22 October 2020]

It's rare seeing a film that is made by an indigenous person for indigenous people starring indigenous people. Tracey Moffatt 's Bedevil uses beautiful, almost eerie cinematography to tell three separate stories of hauntings. But these stories also speak to white colonialism and how Aboriginal people have been pushed to the outer margins in their own country. The film is quirky and very different but still accessible to everyone who doesn't mind watching a movie from a different perspective. Sadly it was not a box office hit at the time, but people have grown to love it and appreciate it for what it is. On another note, it's fun to see old places that I remember, like the local CES office and old buildings that are no longer there.

The trilogy shares the memories of the White settlement in the Australian homeland 200 years ago.

[wajiharaza · 10/10 · 10 April 2014]

BeDevil (1993) addresses the marginalization of Aboriginal Australians in the events, symbolism, and media hype surrounding the bicentenary of European settlement in Australia in 1988. Tracey Moffatt challenges the racial stereotypes by gearing a political process of reform and self-recognition though her postmodernist 'identity search'-driven work aiming at appropriation of hegemonic spectacle. BeDevil disrupts the hegemony of the pure original canon that excluded Aboriginal Australians from the mainstream. This sort of exclusion practice is a known phenomenon worldwide, more so happens in the post-colonial Third World countries like Pakistan and India as both exclude their ethnic minorities from the mainstream media. The author echoes back to Moffatt's stories of bedeviling experiences with tales of similar issues around race, gender, and normality from Islamic Republic of Pakistan, wherein post-Independence immigrants are constantly struggling for appropriation and redefinition of their identities. The Pakistan born children of miscegenation are considered immigrants by descent despite the facts concerning Islamic origins, two nations' theory, migration, and over 60 years residency. The author shares the mutually bedeviling experiences of 'othering' and a struggle with the notions of shared social conscience and histories between children of miscegenation in Australia and Pakistan in the context of the Australian trilogy.