Demonic (2021)
Directed by Neill Blomkamp
A young woman unleashes terrifying demons when supernatural forces at the root of a decades-old rift between mother and daughter are ruthlessly revealed.
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6 films that influenced Demonic
What critics say influenced Demonic
Lacking the rich visual surreal madness of the similarly themed The Cell , or the visual pop of A Scanner Darkly , this simulated reality comes off like an underdeveloped videogame bereft of soul and character.
So, pretty much the same deal as Tarsem Singh’s The Cell , subbing out the serial killer on the loose for an avian demon tagging along as Carly returns to our dimension.
As the doctors at Therapol explain, impulses from the brain are redirected into a virtual space, and other people can then have their own consciousness uploaded into that space – like stepping into someone's mind (or, like stepping into the plot of the much better Jennifer Lopez horror thriller The Cell ).
What's more, they're trialling new technology that allows Carly to step inside her mother's mind - an idea previously explored in 2000's The Cell , not to mention various A Nightmare on Elm Street movies.
In other words, here Blomkamp is doing to exorcism what Tarsem Singh‘s The Cell (2000) did to the psychothriller: using the left-field addition of virtual reality to revitalise these subgenres’ stale old tropes and to expose their inner workings, so that any psychological subtext comes writ large on the surface.
Relying on a setup similar to The Cell , watching a character enter the mind of another (and seeing the visual effect choice that comes with it), only to deal with some kind of demonic force, has an inherently fun ring to it from a horror standpoint.
It’s sort of a blend between early PlayStation games and rotoscope animation à la A Scanner Darkly .
Lacking the rich visual surreal madness of the similarly themed The Cell , or the visual pop of A Scanner Darkly , this simulated reality comes off like an underdeveloped videogame bereft of soul and character.
Carly’s various trips to the mindscape are heavily stylised affairs that vaguely resemble the distinctive rotoscoped aesthetic of Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly, albeit clearly executed on an accelerated timeline and thinner budget.
Review: In theory, I would have been fired up to see director Neill Blomkamp finally bounce back after his follow-up films to District 9 failed to match his high-level starting point.
The director’s breakout feature District 9 is a parable for the evils of apartheid, while his sophomore film Elysium similarly tackles themes of classism and corruption.
Shot in Canada and featuring a small cast lacking the star power of Blomkamp’s previous films, Demonic proves to be quite the disappointment both as a genre-hybrid and a return project for the once hyped Blomkamp, who after making a huge splash with his 2009 feature District 9 has delivered a succession of projects high in concept yet underwhelming in execution.
Blomkamp, of course, made a splashy debut with the overrated District 9 , which combined heavy messages with sci-fi and gory battles.
“Demonic”: Shot during the thick of the pandemic, this horror film by Neill Blomkamp (“District 9”) clunks and gasps along, chugging off the fumes of better movies.
Similar to the way M. Night Shyamalan did with The Visit , this was going to be a reset for the South African director, making an independent film, and shedding himself of the massive box-office budgets, which can lead to too much control by the massive studio system.
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Blending “Assassin’s Creed” with “The Exorcist,” a lot of “Demonic” takes place in what looks like a virtual world, the one in which Carly first confronts her mother and then realizes perhaps she needs saving.
Doing so via a horror film is a smart choice (see also Rob Savage’s successfully schlocky Zoom-horror Host ), and Blomkamp does make some good baseline technical choices in Demonic to get across that sensation, that part-of-but-separate that some of us have become so intimate with.