At one point, Demonic weds exorcism tropes with Neill Blomkamp’s usual fetish for military hardware to arrive at a set of images that are uniquely absurd: of tatted-up servants of the lord who dress like American soldiers, equipped with layers of bullet-proof vests and an array of dazzling weaponry. There’s a satirical undercurrent to these images, for suggesting that we’ve become so militarized across all spectrums of life that packing heat is an inevitability for Catholic priests. However, Demonic is as humorless and literal-minded as Blomkamp’s other films, and so the absurdities of his gimmicks stick out.
For one, though the demon they’re hunting can only be killed by a magic spear, the film’s priests arm themselves to the teeth anyway. Still, before allowing Demonic to collapse into a hodgepodge of action- and horror-movie clichés, Blomkamp springs a potentially resonant premise. The first act of the film is a different genre hybrid altogether, a welding of sci-fi with horror in which a traumatized young woman, Carly (Carly Pope), is asked by top-secret scientists to visit with her comatose mother, Angela (Nathalie Boltt), in an elaborate VR simulation. The idea is to reach Angela in an ongoing effort to learn more about troubled minds, and Blomkamp’s realization of the simulations—dreams as represented by the cartoony, somewhat angular imagery that’s associated with video games—is truly eerie.
In these sequences, Demonic’s imagery suggests corporate co-opting of the intensely personal and irrational, as Carly and Angela’s freighted relationship is rendered a consumable product for the scientists. Most chilling are the flaws in the recreations that are typical of old-school RPGs, such as the screens that haven’t quite filled in yet or the way that portions of Carly and Angela disappear, which double as representations of fissures in memory and fluctuations of emotion. Blomkamp is potentially onto something here, such as a more intimate and lo-fi version of James Cameron’s Avatar or Christopher Nolan’s Inception, but he doesn’t develop these ideas. He’s too eager to get to the bone-crunching, stalking, and slashing.
The demon at the center of the film initially resembles a humanoid raven, and it could’ve been irrationally creepy, but Blomkamp’s preoccupations are such that the beast eventually assumes the form of a muscled man—reduced to another action-movie big bad just in time for a climactic fight. When Carly confronts this creature in a man’s body, a thing that’s ruined her life, all she can think to say is “fuck you.” And this creature from who knows where, with unimaginable cosmic experience, replies with, well, “fuck you.” That’s the dispiritingly basic level of emotional insight that Blomkamp’s screenplay arrives at, and this mediocrity unites Demonic with the filmmaker’s District 9, as both are genre outings with big ideas that are more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics. For that sort of thing, District 9 is a considerably more visceral production. At least that film had memorable, pitiable monsters.
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