If Demonic were from some unknown filmmaker, it would struggle to get into the midnight madness lineup at a small-market film festival. However, because its director, Neill Blomkamp, made District 9 over ten years ago, the film is getting real distribution despite being one of the flattest, most inept horror films in recent memory. The film is stunningly awful in how it doesn’t manage a single scare, nor does it seem to have the patience to develop any of its ideas concerning shared mental space, trauma, or the Vatican’s elite strike force of exorcists. If that last one sounds pretty cool, don’t get too excited—Blomkamp blows it like he does everything else in this utter chore of a picture.
Carly (Carly Pope) hasn’t spoken to her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) in years, but when Carly’s friend Martin (Chris William Martin) tells her that Angela is in a coma and being held a private medical facility, Carly goes to investigate. It turns out that her mother, who was in prison for burning down an old folks home and killing 21 people, is now an unwilling participant in a program that allows people to share a mental space. The doctors want Carly to communicate with her mother, so Carly goes into the shared dream space that looks like one of the The Sims games from 2004. However, in this dream space, Carly sees a dark creature as part of her mother’s consciousness, and that darkness starts to reach out and warp Carly’s reality. In order to save herself and her mother, Carly must confront the otherworldly creature.
Watching Demonic, it’s a little baffling how entire film has so little personality. It’s a completely anonymous production marked only by its low production values, affectless performances, and exposition heavy scenes where characters explain to other characters how things work. So you don’t get any real bonding between Carly and Martin, but you do get a scene where he tells her he’s been doing demon research and by the way, the Vatican has an elite strike force team that’s secretly running the hospital and using it to track down demons like the one currently hanging out in Angela. It’s kind of shocking how limp the entire movie is, and if this were from a first-time director, it may be understandable if not excusable. But it’s shocking to see it come from Blomkamp who has made major motion pictures and presumably knows his way around a camera.
The best I can reason here is that Blomkamp is going for some kind of bizarre authenticity to heighten the scares. He tries to play the film as straight as humanly possible to draw you into the reality of, “What if a loved one was actually possessed by a demon? How would that look given the scientific tools at our disposal?” But he completely blows it because for Blomkamp, a commitment to “reality” also seems to mean a total lack of imagination. For instance, inside the dream-space, he could do anything (budget permitting) because it’s fictitious technology. He could get weird with it and use dream logic to really heighten the scares. Instead, he makes it look like a shitty video game knock-off (this is “volumetric capture”, which seems done to test out technology rather than a decision to use the best storytelling tool available), and while one could argue that such a graphical representation is more “accurate” (although accurate to what exactly when, again, this technology does not exist), it’s not scary, and more often than not, it’s distracting.
Everything Blomkamp does to try and draw us into this world only ends up pushing us further away. If you have this neat idea about a shared dream space being inhabited by a demon causing a psychic wound, then really play around with that and push the bounds of reality rather than locking your characters into glitchy, isometric perspectives that fail to deliver anything remotely horrifying. Play with their (and the audience’s) sense of reality rather than clearly delineating where the dream world ends and the real world begins. And if you’re going to tease an elite team of exorcists, maybe show why they’re elite and badass rather than how they’re dealt with here. Every choice Blomkamp makes is the wrong one and the lack of care brought to this story is kind of stunning when it’s an independent feature that presumably gave him free reign to tell the story the way he wanted.
If Demonic is Blomkamp left to his own devices, then it really throws into question what happened to him since District 9, a film that doesn’t remotely resemble the gross failures of the filmmaker’s most recent effort. You can’t even really credit Blomkamp for being an “idea man” here because we’ve seen the shared dream conceit before (Inception, Vanishing Waves) and simply tossing in a demonic possession doesn’t really up the stakes in any meaningful way because the relationship between Carly and Angela is so broadly defined that it’s simply estrangement giving way to, “I thought you were evil, Mom, but it turns out you were just possessed,” which is a reconciliation based in nonsense since the trauma of the event is an external force blandly standing in for all estrangement. A stronger film would simply ditch all the possession nonsense and make it about how a child deals with a parent who has done something truly monstrous, but then you wouldn’t get all the idiotic trappings that Demonic seeks to provide.
Rating: F
Demonic opens in limited release on August 20th.