Demonic (2021)

Redistricting

It’s fitting that the first Neill Blomkamp movie I actually connected with is also the worst-received of his career.

Yes, Demonic is scoring even lower than Chappie.

I can see why. Pop culture isn’t just about celebrating the entertainment that brings people together; it also involves feeding the insatiable schadenfreude that keeps click-bait and comments sections alive.

When Blomkamp came onto the scene with 2009’s District 9, he was poised to be the next Ridley Scott or Steven Spielberg. But like M. Night Shyamalan before him (who, in fairness had a heartier streak of hits out of the gate), Blomkamp’s shine faded quickly. Movies like Elysium and Chappie garnered opening weekend interest (based largely on residual goodwill from D9), but failed to resonate in the way that films fellow swing-for-the-fences fantasist Christopher Nolan did.

For the record, I admire Blomkamp in the same way I admire Peter Jackson—as an uncompromising craftsman who can create beautiful allegory-rich worlds on a fraction of the typical blockbuster budget. My issues with his films stem from their reliable lapses into cliche, derivative action, and politics that are often too on-the-nose to be believed and/or objectionable to me, personally.

All that said, I was curious as hell to see what he would do in the genre of independent horror. And here we have Demonic.

Conceived, written, shot, cut, and released during the pandemic, the film stars Carly Pope as Carly, a woman who receives word that her estranged mother, Angela (Nathalie Boltt) has fallen into a coma. Researchers at a mysterious research facility (a redundant term in the movies, I know) have found a way to enter Angela’s mind via virtual reality, and they recruit Carly to bring her back to the waking world. This would be a dicy prospect under normal circumstances, but it turns out Mom has a history of committing unspeakably violent acts.

As you may have guessed from the film’s title, there’s something waiting for Carly inside Angela’s psyche. The film dips its toes into A Nightmare on Elm Street territory a couple of times before taking a full-on bath, and while it was obnoxious jotting down all the allusions, I had to admire Blomkamp’s balls in so brazenly appropriating a genre staple.

By now you’re wondering how I can possibly appreciate a derivative horror movie made by a director I don’t really care for. The answer is multi-faceted and completely subjective:

Facet 1: At just about the halfway point, Demonic takes a turn so bonkers that I rewound my screener to make sure I hadn’t missed a smooth transition. Nope, there’s a narrative record scratch that I won’t spoil here—one that transports us from the realm of Wes Craven into the comfy couches of Blomkamp’s wheelhouse.

Part of me is grateful that he didn’t fully explore the possibilities contained within his twist (whether due to budgetary constraints or a genuine desire to Subvert Expectations™). Part of me hopes he’ll flesh out those wacky ideas someday in a Demonic spin-off called God and Guns.

Facet 2: The visuals are remarkable because they are so low-tech. Between District 9’s “prawns”; Matt Damon’s cybernetically enhanced buffness in Elysium; and whatever the hell Chappie was supposed to be, Blomkamp has proven his deftness at assembling digital artists who can create futuristic yet worn-down wonders. One might expect an equally lavish virtual reality landscape in Demonic, but the writer/director opts for a low-key approach that feels designed to represent the present-day state-of-the-art.

When Carly shows up in the digital world, her features are ill-defined, alternately pixelated, and impressionistically sparse. In a few quick shots, her face shows through the back of her head. Here, Blomkamp evokes the surreality of VR immersion, marrying it to the idea that something is “off” with Angela before the other characters know it.

Facet 3: Demonic rounds out an unofficial trilogy of virtual reality thrillers that have come out in the past year—not only in subject matter but in the evolution of the technology that its story represents. If we take the dream clinic sequence from the 1984 Elm Street as the seed, we can draw a straight line to Anthony Scott Burns’ Come True, in which young girl ventures into the depths of her own mind and winds up facing down dark forces (also at the behest of a Researchers with Questionable Motives™). The technology in that film is similar to what we see in Demonic, but with crude, CAD-like renderings of the protagonist’s subconscious environs.

Push the premise a little further, and you get Demonic, a less cerebral and more traditional monster-in-the-mind story whose commitment to techno-realism helps balance out Blomkamp’s harder-to-swallow narrative elements when they arise.

The capper is Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, a film that launches us forward into a time where reality has become so experientially malleable that corporations sell the ability for people to remotely inhabit one another.

Demonic is definitely the middle-chapter “lull” in this trio, but it fits nicely within a burgeoning subgenre whose roots go back decades and whose future is only now being loosely sketched out.

I can’t hold any of these facets up as reasons for people who aren’t me to seek out and enjoy this movie. But I can say that there’s a lot to appreciate in Demonic. Pope, Boltt, and Terry Chen (playing one of the clinic technicians) deliver performances that made me wish I were watching a movie about them not confronting a hairy, beak-skulled nether monster. I also dug the nuggets of Blomkamp’s imagination peering out through the boilerplate (it’s quite something to see a demon emerge from a body through thermal-imaging goggles, lemme tell ya).

Demonic isn’t scary. The limitations of its production are obvious if you know where to look for them. And the Elm Street stuff is just too audacious to ignore.

But I love seeing Blomkamp stripped down to the essentials. Constrained by time, budget, and pandemic logistics, he left allegory at the door and turned in a movie that works better as a coming-to-terms-with-trauma movie than as a jump-scare jubilee. Demonic is far from perfect, and only in the neighborhood of good, but it’s a solid first step in a new direction—virtually a new career.

Post-script: In “Disregard That Last Paragraph News”, Blomkamp recently announced that he is in pre-production on a District 9 sequel.

Chicagoans can catch Demonic on the big screen at the historic Music Box Theatre. Regardless of where you live, you can watch my interview with star Carly Pope on the Kicking the Seat YouTube channel.