"Devil in Ohio" Snapshot Review

Release Date: September 2, 2022

Platform: Netflix

Genre: Thriller

After a young girl, Mae, is brought to the hospital with signs of abuse, psychiatrist Dr. Suzanne Mathis agrees to takes the girl home until appropriate placement is found. Bringing Mae home disrupts the lives of the doctor's husband, Peter, and three daughters, Helen, Jules, and Dani. As she tries to adapt to her new surroundings, Mae demonstrates odd social behaviors, becomes weirdly obsessed with Suzanne, and develops a manipulative bond with Jules. Suzanne suddenly starts devoting all of her time to helping figure out what happened to Mae, including assisting Detective Lopez with his investigation. Once they suspect that Mae escaped from a cult, they begin to discover the dark history of Amon County, the location from which Mae escaped, and their ongoing efforts to get her back.

This series ultimately flounders its most interesting concepts and pulls its audience towards disappointing developments and conclusions. The best version of this narrative would have dived deeper into the threat posed by the power held by the satanic Amontown cult or peel back on the crumbling family dynamics led by Mae's distorted strategies to wedge herself closer to Suzanne. Instead, the writing was focused more on Suzanne's uninteresting past and the trauma that drives her empathy for Mae. The supporting characters, which have more interesting dynamics with Mae, ignore so many of the clear warning signs that Mae is not the innocent victim she makes herself out to be. There are clear conflicts brewing in every episode and, yet, the show holds out on acknowledging their existence until the latter episodes, though with little/no resolution. When the story builds towards a conflict, it quickly rushes past it and rests its laurels on the false pretense of its victim-focused premise.

It was insulting to see the series trade out its satanic subject matter for the substandard approach of a network medical drama. There are a number of aspects that give the show promise but it simply ignores capitalizing on those engaging plot threads. The ending falls flat and has story developments that would have been better positioned in the middle of the season. It is almost like there was a decent set up in the first few episodes then a bunch of filler until the finale. It's not terrible or unwatchable, but just mundane. It does not bring anything new to the table when compared to similar narratives and suffers from worse writing than other Netflix Original thrillers. There are a lot of eye-catching draws to this series and many will get lured in, but at its end, you will forget about this series just as quickly as you move onto the next hot release.at.

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RATING: 🔥 🔥 / 5

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