[Film Review] Demonic (2021)

Neill Blomkamp crashed onto the scene with his 2009 sci-fi horror film District 9, a found footage style dystopic nightmare that examined the effects of xenophobia and societal disintegration through insectoid invasion. It was an innovative and captivating debut feature film from a director whose vision was focused on creating something truly original. Years later, Blomkamp has released his first foray into possession horror with Demonic, a film completely devoid of the aspirational wonder that was once associated with the director’s name. Shot in secret during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Demonic tells the tale of a woman who is coerced to virtually enter the mind of her estranged mother, a mass murderer stuck in a comatose state.  

Carly (Carly Pope) is a woman with a rotten past, information that we are given as her backstory is exposited through broken scenes that feel placed haphazardly for the story’s plot. Her friend Martin (Chris William Martin) reaches out to her to let her know that her mother, Angela (Nathalie Boltt) is a comatose patient at a focus group he was contacted to participate in. This comes as a shock to Carly, as last she knew her mother was locked away in a prison for the murder of over 25 people twenty years prior. 

When the company in charge of the study of which her mother is a subject tracks Carly down, she can’t resist hearing them out. Two men, David (Terry Chen) and Michael (Michael Rogers) present themselves as doctors and explain their method to Carly. The program is run with a computer system that enables the users to enter the mind of the comatose patient and interact with their consciousness through virtual reality. It is revealed to Carly that Angela asked for her specifically, a fact which sways Carly toward allowing herself to be uploaded into her mother’s mind. 

The graphics once Carly enters the system are engaging, to be sure. There’s a bit of creativity that Blomkamp taps into when depicting the inner workings of Angela’s mind that is a welcome break in the tedious dialogue and paper-thin characters. The scenes within the mind contribute to the overwhelming feeling that we’re watching scenes from a video game, a thought that comes up later in the film when other technological gadgets are utilized to show action that is less realistic and more fantastical. This in itself isn’t a negative thing, but it can’t be denied that the techniques tend to outshine the story, a glossy sheen over an overwhelmingly shallow narrative. 

As the story moves forward, Martin reveals to Carly that he has been plagued with images and nightmares the entire twenty years since he and Carly found her mother passed out at the sanitorium that has been appearing in Carly’s dreams. Martin lays out the entire story of what happened to Angela twenty years prior, including the involvement of the Vatican and a very specific demon. It’s all very specific, very over the top, and at this moment the film takes a turn into the absurd and plows steadily forward toward a fiery finale. 

The biggest issue with Demonic is that, for all its ideas, the story is messy. A lot of ideas are presented with little explanation or follow through. The audience is meant to believe that the demon that has kept house in Angela for twenty years has all of a sudden decided it wants to jump into Carly for reasons unknown. The tenuous lines that are drawn between what is reality and what is the dream or virtual world are meant to be accepted without question. And on a normal day, that may be acceptable, especially when the characters are well-developed, but in this case, Blomkamp seems to have skipped a bit of the process, choosing to present a sugary, visually overpowering meal with little substance.

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