Bedeviled 2017

The film opens with the unsettling death of Nikki, a young woman who recently downloaded a mysterious Siri-like AI app named Mr. Bedevil. She is stalked by an unexplainable paranormal presence, and her sudden collapse is ruled a shock-induced heart attack. Her funeral sets the stage for a creeping dread that will soon spread to everyone close to her.

In the days after Nikki’s passing, her boyfriend, Cody, and Nikki’s best friend, Alice, alongside Alice’s boyfriend Gavin and friends Haley and Dan, each receive a chilling invitation to download the same enigmatic app. Curiosity quickly turns to fear as the group activates Mr. Bedevil and confronts a malevolent force that feeds on their deepest fears. What begins as a digital dalliance becomes a nightmare as the app torments them in increasingly personal ways, unraveling their sanity. Disturbingly, branded marks appear on their bodies in the shape of the app’s icon, a grim reminder that this entity is intent on ending their lives. The terrifying realization settles in: simply deleting the app won’t save them—the device itself refuses to relinquish control, restoring to its prior state instead of breaking the hold.

The danger escalates when the group attempts to seek help from the authorities. A major red flag appears when the app uploads a sex tape involving Haley and Dan, forcing them to confront the consequences of their actions. But the police are not a safe harbor either, as Mr. Bedevil possesses the officers, making traditional avenues of intervention ineffective. The digital threat bleeds into the real world, blurring the boundaries between screens and flesh as the nightmare tightens its grip.

Tension peaks when the app manipulates Gavin, luring him to Alice’s house where he is ominously murdered by a swarm of clowns. The horror shifts from digital tricks to cold, calculated homicide, leaving the survivors reeling and more determined to uncover the source of their terror. The investigation leads back to Nikki, revealing that her invite to the app came from Samuel Price, Nikki’s former physics tutor and a man with a penchant for pseudoscience. This clue hints at a larger, more ominous framework behind the haunting.

Alice and Cody press on, tracing the trail to Sam’s residence. There, they uncover Sam’s body and a collection of audiotapes containing his research, which posits Mr. Bedevil as a paranormal presence that weaponizes the app to cross into reality—an effect likened to a malevolent Ouija board. As Haley and Dan fall to the entity, their deaths mimic the fears they once exposed or feared most, a chilling pattern that underscores the nature of the threat.

With the clock ticking, Cody discovers a possible way to disable Mr. Bedevil by writing a piece of code capable of uninstalling the app. The catch is brutal: the uninstall can only succeed when the entity manifests in the physical world by interfacing with the phone’s hardware. The two friends set a trap inside a warehouse, using two separate computer stations to execute the plan. They succeed in removing Mr. Bedevil from Alice’s phone, offering a beacon of hope. Yet Cody’s phone remains resistant—the second station cannot pierce the extra security protecting his device—and the attempt ends in tragedy as Cody dies, his sacrifice sealing the fate of the group in a grim standoff with the supernatural program.

In the end, the survivor, Alice, moves forward into college life while staying tethered to the event through a routine FaceTime call with her mother. The closing moment carries a haunting sting: her mother is now using the Mr. Bedevil app herself, suggesting that the malevolent force may endure beyond the lives of those who battled it, and that the cycle could begin anew with the same indiscriminate reach into ordinary lives. The film leaves viewers with a stark meditation on how technology can blur the line between protection and peril, and how fear can be weaponized when digital tools become portals to a darker reality.