Studio: IFC Midnight
Director: Neill Blomkamp
Writer: Neill Blomkamp
Producer: Neill Blomkamp, Mike Blomkamp, Stuart Ford, Linda McDonough
Stars: Carly Pope, Chris William Martin, Michael J. Rogers, Nathalie Boltt, Kandyse McClure, Terry Chen
Review Score:
Summary:
A secretive medical research team uses virtual reality so a woman can enter the mind of her demonically possessed mother.
Review:
Unlike a lot of genre film fans, I don’t have a strong opinion on Neill Blomkamp one way or the other. I saw “District 9” back in 2009 like everybody else and remember being sucked into the setting and thinking he created a pretty cool concept. That said, I’d be hard pressed to recall definitive details about the film now, and who knows what my current opinion might be.
I also rarely pay much attention to project announcements and other “what ifs,” mainly because many of those movies never come to fruition or else start PR so early that excitement flames out long before release. Accordingly, I never put any investment into Blomkamp’s much-ballyhooed proposal for rebooting/reviving the “Alien” franchise beyond being aware he had ideas some fans loved and some folks abhorred.
Everything above combined with lukewarm receptions for his other efforts caused Blomkamp to become a mini-Zack Snyder of sorts. It’s to a lesser extent for sure, but Blomkamp appears to have developed a divisive reputation where devoted diehards salivate anytime his name gets mentioned. Meanwhile, eye-rollers insist he only made one good movie, which was only good because Peter Jackson had a hand in it.
Like I said, I don’t have a dog in that fight. I merely mention all of this so that when I tell you “Demonic” is fully forgettable filler, you’ll know it’s strictly on the merits of the movie being blandly basic, and has nothing to do with any predisposition about the man who made it.
“Demonic” built up a bit of buzz for being filmed in semi-secret during the COVID-19 pandemic. From little leaks and brief media blurbs, it looked like Blomkamp was cooking up killer small-scale scares that combined classic creeps with the cutting-edge tech he’s know for. Whatever frightful fantasy those sound bites were trying to hint at however, is not the mundanely mediocre movie “Demonic” is.
How do I trope thee? Let me count the ways.
Someone suddenly waking from a nightmare sequence (three times).
Someone hiding from a stalker with a hand held over her mouth.
An abandoned building built on reportedly cursed land.
A possessed person contorting backwards for a spider crawl.
Classical music, in this case Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, juxtaposed against an elegantly eerie milieu.
A “crazy” person constructing a CSI board of exposition composed from newspaper clippings, pictures, and Post-It notes. All that’s missing is red yarn strung between thumbtacks
It’s the nature of horror movies to employ one or two such conceits from time to time. Haunted people have nightmares. Obsessive people build informative bulletin boards. But when your fiction’s foundation and all of your scares come exclusively from things everyone has seen a zillion times before, your entire movie comes off as cliché. That’s exactly what happens here.
Let’s strip down the story to a simple summary. That’ll make it easier to point out the places where “Demonic” fumbles its football instead of performing a clever juke that could cut a path to a touchdown.
It takes her a while to figure out what the audience already knows, but Carly’s murderous mother Angela is demonically possessed. A mysterious medical research company invented technology that allows people to enter the mind of a comatose person, which Angela is, and they need Carly to do dirty work for them. Carly enters her mother’s dreamscape and unlocks an evil connected to an undercover Vatican operation as well as Carly’s two best friends. And that evil entity wants to make Carly its next host.
The only unique element “Demonic” brings to an otherwise routine exorcism tale is this VR component, although even that only factors in for a few minutes. I was honestly shocked, a little confused too, to find out the volumetric capture technology Blomkamp used ate up 15 terabytes of data each day. One critic called the effect “stunning.” This is definitely a case of, “Did we watch the same movie?” For something this processing-intensive that involves 250 cameras shooting at 4k resolution, I have an incredibly difficult time understanding why Blomkamp would then make the footage chunky, glitchy, and sun-bleached. I kid you not, scenes shot with the volumetric capture rig look like they were compiled on a Sega Saturn.
The technology’s relationship to the story ends up being so incidental, it has the knock-on effect of making parts of the plot laughable. Here we have a billion-dollar research corporation inventing an unprecedented simulator capable of psychically projecting someone into another person’s subconscious, yet this same company apparently doesn’t have the internet. The men conducting this research repeatedly ask Carly for details about her mother’s crimes, including the location of the sanitarium Angela burned down. What, was Google no help? Carly’s friend has an entire newspaper clipping collection about the case. Surely a public record exists somewhere with this significant building’s exact address, no?
Maybe it’s the former Catholic in me, but I actually thought “Demonic’s” nutty notion of a secret Vatican Black Ops team where clergymen dress up like a church unit of Navy Seals was foolishly fun. It’s totally ridiculous to see beefed-up priests with big crosses branded onto their backs arming up with assault rifles and talking about 1,000-year-old holy lance relics. Their “gearing up” montages look like cheesy cutscenes from an off-brand “Gears of War” game, though it’s this kind of over-the-top outrageousness that could have taken “Demonic” in unexpected directions as a kooky cult classic.
That’s the root of “Demonic’s” problem. Here you have a high-concept guy like Neill Blomkamp teasing a few weirdly inventive ideas, then he squanders his sci-fi setup on a stale demonic possession story. Like the VR aspect, the Vatican’s secret soldiers barely serve the story as brief blips that aren’t really relevant. Even though they had Carly under surreptitious surveillance and endangered her life by basically using her as bait, they never have a direct reckoning with the woman. They pay a price for their actions, but they’re unceremoniously slaughtered offscreen, making them mere meat bags whose backstory hardly matters as anything other than a cursory catalyst for Carly’s arc.
“Unnecessary” becomes a running theme throughout “Demonic.” In one scene, Carly calls the police immediately upon discovering her friend Sam is missing. A cop comes to take a look. After walking around with his flashlight for a moment, the cop tells Carly he can’t do anything about a missing person until 48 hours have passed. Understandably upset, Carly falls back on her friend Martin for help finding Sam.
Good on Carly for doing the right thing. Often in horror movies, you’ll wonder why a hero doesn’t take an obvious action in certain circumstances, particularly when alerting an authority is in order. This is still two throwaway minutes that advance nothing. I appreciate the acknowledgement that Carly does what she’s supposed to do. But wouldn’t it be better for the film’s flow to shorten this interaction to a phone call while she’s already driving to Martin’s?
Neill Blomkamp’s name is the only thing preventing “Demonic” from dissolving into the DTV stream as another negligible nothing of a demonic possession movie. If you or I had brought this script to a studio, we would have been laughed out of the pitch meeting, and that’s only if the suits stayed awake long enough to get to the goofy part that sounds like an altar boy’s 4chan fan fiction.
Review Score: 45
It is moderately compelling in the moment, but it has a hard time holding up to even cursory scrutiny as far as believable “found footage” concepts go.