Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead Review

Led by great performances, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is a worthy swan song for director Sidney Lumet and a tense, chaotic thriller in its own right.

Lumet is best known for iconic movies of the previous century like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, and Network. But he went out with a showing that, while not as renowned as those movies, still gave audiences the kind of sharp, sleek, subversive, and intelligent experience that’s defined his whole career.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is told nonlinearly, jumping back and forth in time and between multiple characters’ points of view. The focal point is an attempted robbery by Andy Hanson (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, of Punch-Drunk Love) and his brother Hank (Ethan Hawke, of Before Sunrise) of their parents’ jewelry store. When the operation falls apart, the brothers are caught in an increasingly chaotic scramble to cover up their involvement in the crime. Also featured in the film are Albert Finney (Murder on the Orient Express) as their father, and Marisa Tomei (Spider-Man: No Way Home) as Gina, Andy’s disloyal wife.

Hoffman and Hawke are the predictable standouts; so much of the film hinges on their delivery as two aligned yet very different brothers. Because their individual stories are told somewhat separately from each other, you first get a good look at Hank as the much softer, vulnerable, down-on-his-luck sibling who needs money to pay child support for his hostile ex-wife (Amy Ryan, of Beau is Afraid). You feel for him very quickly because of how everyone, from his brother to his ex-wife to his father, looks down on him as a weak man for not taking greater action. When really, when you look at how borderline cruel they can be, it seems more like they look down on him for not being as cold and ruthless as they are.

Andy, by contrast, is a well-off businessman whose true intentions are kept much vaguer at first, almost alienating you from his character. While Hawke’s performance is great, Hoffman’s keeps you guessing a bit more, even after you see that his robbery plan is born from the consequences of his own greed. Just one extended shot of him alone, in a lavish but empty apartment, gets across how empty he is inside in spite of his financial and (seemingly) personal success. As the story continues and everything keeps falling apart, his controlled, hardened exterior slowly and gruesomely collapses until his true, suppressed, emotionally crippled self finally comes out. Hank may look like the feebler brother for not being more openly aggressive, but Andy is ultimately much smaller on the inside.

The nonlinear nature of the movie’s structure accomplishes two major goals. The first is that it creates a sense of chaos as events are split up and scattered, giving us an idea of what each character’s perspective is like and how much – or, more often, how little – they really know about how bad things have gotten. The other is that you’re set up to look at a given character or situation one way, only to then go back in time and learn of a complicated new wrinkle that changes how you look at the story. The brothers’ father first appears to be your typical unassuming, middle-class, elder patriarch. But then you get a look at how fragile he is on the inside, followed by later reveals of a darker angle to his character that make his final decision line up perfectly with everything you’ve seen.

For my money, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is really about what makes a man happy, how emotional distance can be passed down generations, and how false the veneer of toughness and confidence often is. Those who appear to have everything may actually have nothing, and those seemingly with nothing may have the more human core that’s needed to survive. The only thing I didn’t like was, surprisingly, Finney’s performance. It’s not bad, but he plays up the old, weary, unaware angle of his character to such a degree that the rest of the character’s complicated personality tends to get lost.

It was compelling to see, for the first time, what a 21st-century Sidney Lumet film looks and feels like. He brings his smooth, simple, direct approach to every scene while keeping the pulpy energy high with eye-catching blocking and blunt, tumultuous human emotion. That’s what made him such a standout director in his prime, but these traits are woven in with the snappy, dynamic editing and glossy presentation that are more common in the past twenty-odd years. It’s such a perfect evolution of his style. I could frequently imagine these shots and line deliveries in a much older movie, and yet they still feel perfectly at home in the 2000s.

There’s also something bittersweet knowing that Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead was Lumet’s final film before his passing. Hell, the final shot of the movie is eerily fitting with that hindsight. That’s not necessarily a credit to the film itself, but it does shape the experience in a meaningful way. Even in his 80s, Lumet managed to go out on a really satisfying note. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is tense, unconventional, filled with great performances, and a hectic unraveling of two men whose very different lives bring them to the same violent head. It’s more than worth checking out, whether you want to see a legend’s swan song or just an awesome thriller in its own right.

Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead is now available to watch on digital and on demand, and on DVD & Blu-Ray.

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