Demonic (2021)
From writer director Neill Blomkamp comes a film so bizarre and disjointed that it is next to impossible to give a quick summary of what the movie is really about. Essentially, the movie follows Carly, ironically played by actress Carly Pope, who becomes involved in a scientific experiment where she is given the chance to communicate with her mother who has fallen into a coma during her imprisonment for committing several heinous crimes. While the initial intrigue of this scenario does keep the viewer engaged along with the initial suspense Blomkamp creates through Carly’s nightmares shown at the start of the film the silly way in which the movie depicts the conversations between the mother and her daughter in the dreamscape they can both inhabit through technological assistance broke my suspension of disbelief and the movie only went downhill from there as the script soon lost any sense of coherence or continuity.
Neill Blomkamp broke onto the scene in 2009 with the hit film District 9 which was a project born out of a failed Halo adaptation which Blomkamp repurposed and turned into a roaring success. District 9 is an incredible movie that includes several elements of the horror genre including body horror, torture, evil characters, and extreme violence which to me minimized the shock that I had when I saw that Blomkamp had shifted away from his focus on science fiction to make a horror film. While there are moments where you can see that Blomkamp is still a more than competent director including the inventive cinematography, convincing special effects, and moody lighting the problems with the script shine through.
Given that Blomkamp had effectively used elements of the horror genre before in his previous films I was shocked to see how horribly misguided this movie was both in terms of creating a convincing dark force to operate in the film and the confounding way in which the filmmaker tried to incorporate it into the film. Specifically, Carly’s mother Angela, played by Nathalie Boltt, is said to have become possessed, or something of that nature, by a dark spirit which may have motivated her to commit the crimes that she did. While this is not a unique concept it is still one that can be done effectively or even elevated by presenting it in a unique way as it was in the 2017 Paco Plaza film I just watched reviewed titled Veronica. While the backstory that attempts to explain the possession is wholly uninteresting it is made even more tiresome by the awful character design given to the demonic presence of the film which appeared to be some kind of plague mask esque feathery creature.
Given the incredible special effects work Neill Blomkamp has included in his previous films and which he is known for being the master of I was more than confounded by how such a lackluster creature design was chosen to be the centre of his horror film. Not that improvement in this area alone would have been enough to make the movie work, since there were a litany of problems plaguing the film, but it would have given the movie, at the very least, something for the audience to feel afraid of rather than simply dreading how much time was left before the credits rolled.
Each time Carly attempts to contact her mother in the dreamscape made available to both of them by the hospital caring for her the audience is subjected to what can best be described as a rotoscoped version of reality reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s films A Scanner Darkly (2006) or Apollo 10 1/2 (2022). While I can appreciate the unique vision of Blomkamp and his attempt to try and do something different in the horror genre it mostly made the film appear to be an unfinished video game rendering rather than the confusing hellscape he tried to transform it into as the movie went along. That is not to say that Blomkamp’s vision is entirely unrealized as he did utilize this technique well at times to create some convincing surreal moments such as the one pictured above where Carly and her mother seem to be standing in a way which ignored gravity. However, the unpolished appearance of these sequences and the way in which it worked to mute the performance of the actors trapped within its confides, in my opinion, predominately worked to undermine the horror story the movie was trying to convey as it made it feel superficial and inauthentic even within a science fiction horror film.
While the focus group and scientific community working on Carly and her mother were interesting at first, reminiscent of the opening moments of the 1984 Stephen King adaptation of Firestarter, the hilarious plot twist later in the film where it is shown that the scientists are in actuality a group of militant Vatican priests made it hard not to laugh. The movie undermines itself constantly both through poorly executing the horror elements of the story and insisting on having the movie not focus on any aspect of the plot for to long as it constantly shifts its focus such that we are never sure as a viewer whether we should be more concerned with Carly’s nightmare visions, her work with the scientists trying to communicate with her mom, her missing friend, or her rekindling her relationship with a former flame. Had the movie streamlined the plot so that scenes built on one another rather than having the film feel like a jumble of nonsense thrown in a blender and given a quick coat of veneer through the slick direction of Neill Blomkamp perhaps it could have made for an adequate movie.
I must mention how much the storyline of priests disguising their demon hunting ways as scientific inquiry reminded me of The Initiative in the fourth season of the incredible TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer where Buffy discovers that her boyfriend and professor at school are both members of The Initiative. BTVS is an incredible series that is able to stretch across a plethora of genres including drama, horror, and comedy while doing them all justice by taking them all seriously when they need to. However, in Demonic the movie never fully committed to any of its ideas by constantly having them remain unresolved as the movie quickly moved onto the next tangent it wanted to explore. For instance, the backstory of Carly’s mother being a criminal and the community shunning her as a result are never fully realized in the movie and are just mentioned in passing such that while we see Carly able to function in society and have friends we never gain an appreciation of the isolation she had felt previously. Furthermore, the crimes Angela, Carly’s mother, commits are quickly glossed over as the movie then tried to focus on how this was the result of demonic possession such that while this may help to explain why Angela did what she did it nullified the weight of the actions it was trying to explain to make the whole endeavour worthless.
Each of the previous Blomkamp films that I have seen including District 9 (2009), Elysium (2013), and Chappie (2015) tell character driven stories with the backdrop of extreme circumstance be it an alien colony in Africa, extreme medical distress, or legal persecution. In each film Blomkamp utilized special effects and his intense focus on technology to help tell a personal story while here the formal aspects of the film appeared to be the story while the characters were the backdrop.
Demonic was filmed during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic which might help to explain the disjointed nature of the film and unorthodox way in which it is presented, however people do not watch movies so that they can excuse its faults afterward as some kind of cinematic apologist. Furthermore, the casting of Nathalie Boltt to play Carly Pope’s mother even though she is only seven years older than her points to a gross tradition in Hollywood which to me made me incapable of excusing the technical and content level faults within the film.
I want to briefly mention another aspect of the film I found troubling, though this is more a general comment on society rather than an indictment of this film in particular. A few months ago I watched an episode of This is Life with Lisa Ling which focused on the growing problem around alcohol consumption in the United States especially among young women who are experiencing major health consequences when they become dependent on or simply consume too much alcohol. One of the major factors that the episode claimed could be influencing this sharp uptick in instances of young women becoming addicted to and suffering health consequences from alcohol consumption is pop culture which often depicts women consuming alcohol, particularly wine, in social situations. Following this troubling trend I found the inclusion of a scene where Carly and her close friend have a conversation on a patio while consuming wine somewhat troubling, not that it was done in excess or given an abnormal amount of attention, just the inclusion of this as a sort of routine to the point that it is cliche concerning given the trends in society.
Demonic is an awful film on almost every level that is prevented from being included amongst the worst films of all time by some creative and sometimes effective filmmaking along with a visually interesting poster. Most of the acting in this movie ranges from barely serviceable to a complete farce such as the awful moment late in the film where Carly has a conversation with a dying priest who tries to warn her about the looming danger surrounding with all of the force of a Tommy Wiseau monologue. It should come as no surprise that I cannot recommend this film, which is a shame since Blomkamp is a director I have appreciated for years and have anxiously awaited his return to making feature length projects. Hopefully better things are around the corner for Blomkamp and this movie is forgotten so as to not obscure what up to now has been an incredible catalogue of films.
Here is the trailer for Demonic: