Two recent films are bound to come to viewers’ minds while watching Bill Purple’s feature debut “The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea,” one more obvious than the other. The less obvious point of comparison is “Demolition,” Jean-Marc Vallée’s recent seriocomic examination of a man’s eccentric (to put it mildly) expressions of his grief over his wife’s sudden death. Though the grieving husband in Purple’s film, Henry (Jason Sudeikis), doesn’t have the same obsession with destroying physical objects in order to better understand their inner workings as Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal) in Vallée’s film does, Henry — also a successful middle-class type with a penchant for caution that is shattered by his personal loss — similarly finds himself developing a mania that seems crazy to most outside his usual circles: an obsession with helping a homeless girl, Millie (Maisie Williams), fulfill her dream of building a raft to sail to the Azores, in order to escape from an abusive uncle (Jayson...
