Exorcism meets virtual reality in Neill Blomkamp’s Demonic, a film that boasts several weird and interesting ideas but barely skims their surface. It’s bold and unique in the way it captures spiritual fears in a technological landscape, but this exploration is frustratingly cast aside in favor of by-the-numbers horror that hardly commits to its own ridiculous premise.
Demonic follows Carly (Carly Pope), a middle-aged woman who’s talked into communicating with her estranged, comatose mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) through a new form of virtual reality — however, we quickly learn that they’re not alone in this digital dreamscape. The film is at its most interesting, thematically and aesthetically, during Carly’s multiple trips to see her mother. The space she inhabits is created by Angela’s mind, which, with the help of VR technology, renders it like a video game, bringing doors and passageways into existence right before Carly wanders through them. This world feels uncanny, as if real locations and characters had been coated with a thin layer of digital paint. The camera alternates between sticking close to Carly and taking an “objective” overhead angle. In one moment, it employs a head-on POV, which centers her emotional discovery through close-ups. In the next, it captures a floorplan of the mysterious technological world as Carly carefully explores it.
The frames in this world often jitter as if there’s too much information to process; Blomkamp understands the enormity of turning memory into a digital space. He even uses glitches and impossible physics to denote the bizarre, maybe even supernatural goings-on within Angela’s mind. It’s a haunting image of what a literal ghost in the machine might look like, if one could digitize every element of the human psyche, including its deepest, darkest fears. As Carly emerges into the real world after meeting with her mother, a number of visual flourishes hint at her fractured self-identity. When she’s debriefed and recorded by the executive and doctor who are overseeing the whole ordeal, Michael (Michael J. Rogers) and Daniel (Terry Chen), she’s presented out of focus, and only visible to us on their camera’s monitor. We begin to see her as she sees herself, indirectly, distorted through mirrors and glass, as if her perspective has come unglued.
Somehow, all of this takes up an incredibly tiny portion of the film.
In addition to its haunted digital consciousness, Demonic also features a related, parallel tale of physical haunting, one that proves just how much Blomkamp’s strengths lie in the realm of VFX and the way human beings interact with technology. Carly’s forays into the eerie digital world are often broken up by less interesting real-world segments involving secondary characters like her ex Martin (Chris William Martin), and her best friend Sam (Kandyse McClure). The way she’s framed in isolation certainly piques curiosity, but as the film goes on, she shares more and more scenes with other characters, and the Demonic’s limitations become increasingly apparent. The conversations in Blomkamp’s script are often stilted and unnatural. The movie is lucky to feature a lead actress as naturalistic as Pope to balance it out. Unfortunately, she’s the only cast member who does. It’s practically a superpower in a film like this, in which the protagonist rarely makes active decisions (everything happens either to or around her) and every bit of dialogue, from characters greeting one another to emotional confessions, all feel like exposition first. You can feel Pope struggling to inject her character with some form of lived reality (she’s especially adept at radiating anxiety and discomfort), but the filmmaking does her no favors. The way it frames characters in conversation, with little care for their physical or emotional relationships, comes across as amateurish and rote. It’s as if the goal isn’t to convey a feeling but to establish logistical information.
There’s something almost fascinating about a film that feels totally at ease in the digital world but seems to be on autopilot when dealing with flesh and blood. Almost. For a moment, it seems like this uncanniness during dialogue-heavy scenes might serve a distinct purpose, but whatever twists and turns that appear to be foreshadowed turn out not to pay off. The intrigue is mostly accidental. With Demonic, what you see is what you get, and what you see isn’t very engaging. While its rare moments of VR-specific terror are placed on full display, the movie’s real-world horror segments play out far too mechanically to have any bite. Demonic has the familiar look and design of a typical horror film, with dim, narrow hallways fit for plenty of jump scares. However, the construction of each familiar moment ends up limp and tensionless. It lacks finesse. Each minor miscalculation — when exactly to cut during an intense set-piece, what kind of shot to cut to, or when to play a jarring sound cue — eventually adds up, and so it plays like a hollow imitation of much more effective possession films.
At one point, Demonic actually seems like it’s about to introduce an especially kooky wrinkle, with regards to who its exorcists might be and how they navigate the modern world and its modern supernatural problems. The idea is revealed through a line of dialogue that’s so laugh-out-loud ridiculous that it reframes the entire premise, shifting it towards the realm of a self-aware midnight movie. However, this too ends up being a broken promise; it’s largely dealt with off-screen. No idea in Demonic seems to last too far beyond its introduction, save for the occasional concept that might briefly re-emerge to serve a plot function before disappearing once again. It’s quite a shame, considering the film’s potential.
Biomechanical anxieties run throughout Blomkamp’s work. In District 9, Wikus (Sharlto Copley) begins mutating into an alien, which allows him to use DNA-coded extraterrestrial tech. In Elysium, Max (Matt Damon) is surgically fused with a metallic exoskeleton, and has a program coded into his brain. Blomkamp’s shelved Alien project would have seen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) wear a biomechanical Xenomorph suit. In Chappie, Deon (Dev Patel) is resurrected after his consciousness is stored on a series of PlayStations; it’s a sillier film than the rest, but it asks similar questions about our relationship to machines, and whether the soul can be reconciled with ones and zeroes. Demonic’s virtual reality segments are a natural progression of these ideas. They hint at what could have been Blomkamp’s most intimate exploration of technology, and they’re also more conceptually interesting than what sci-fi anthologies like Black Mirror and Solos have done with VR in recent years, down to the way certain events from Carly’s past manifest both in her dreams as well as her virtual experiences.
As we live more of our lives online, the mind-body connection becomes an understandable fixation in modern sci-fi, but it so often breaks human consciousness down to simple code without digging into the clash between the technological and the spiritual. Few Hollywood films since the Matrix trilogy have even attempted this — which makes Demonic’s sidelining of the concept all the more frustrating. It points towards fascinating questions about how religious beliefs may transform in a digitized, mechanized world, and the ways deep-seated folklore may take hold as we pour cultural fears into online spaces. However, it chooses not to follow those instincts, which might have offered its lead character a much more challenging and complicated emotional journey. Instead, the film reveals its unoriginal demon mythology not only in traditional terms — through snippets of analog historical research — but in a way that circumvents the chilling sensation of discovering something horrifying. The information is simply presented to Carly in pre-assembled form, like someone leaning over to you in the theater and whispering “that’s demonic” when a shapeless figure appears on-screen.
Blomkamp is far more adept at heavy-handed social metaphors than nuanced storytelling, and the lack of the former really hurts him here. The film’s scares are largely traditional too, born of a combination of physical startles and things often explained away in literal terms. Its eventual climax barely features the virtual world at all. For a film with such a new and unique premise, Demonic is awfully quick to bury its ideas beneath ones that have been done to death by dozens of better films.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/37XicUz
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