Eye For Film >> Movies >> The Devil Is Busy (2024) Film Review
With The Devil Is Busy, co-directors Geeta Gandbhir and Christalyn Hampton deliver a concise but piercing snapshot of post-Roe v Wade America, further confirming Gandbhir’s sharp eye for the country’s institutional and moral pathologies, a sensibility also evident in her Oscar-nominated feature documentary The Perfect Neighbor. Set over the course of a single day at a women’s health clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, the documentary captures both the banal routines and the extraordinary strain involved in seeking an abortion in a nation that still insists on calling itself “the land of the free”.
What emerges most vividly is not only the ordeal faced by the women arriving at the clinic, but the constant vigilance required to protect them. The film centres much of its attention on Tracii, the clinic’s head of security, whose work resembles that of someone preparing for a defensive operation rather than an ordinary workday. Her presence alone becomes a damning measure of the hostility surrounding reproductive healthcare.
The title lands most forcefully in the spectacle of idle men who have made harassment their calling. If idle hands are the devil’s workshop, then the devil is indeed busy outside this clinic, in the Christian men who gather with signs and megaphones to shame women seeking care. In an America where many people can scarcely survive even with multiple jobs, their ability to spend entire mornings, even whole days, loitering outside a clinic feels both perverse and damning. Tracii’s description of some of them as “resident protesters” only underlines how routine this has become.
Brief yet urgent, The Devil Is Busy is less an exposé than a stark record of normalised cruelty. It is a sobering testament to what it means when a women’s health clinic requires security infrastructure comparable to a conflict zone.
Reviewed on: 18 Mar 2026
