"DEMONIC" (2021)

Demonic (2021)
Written and directed by Neill Blomkamp
Starring Carly Pope, Nathalie Boltt, Chris William Martin
Running time 1 hour, 44 minutes
Currently unrated but contains numerous instances of violence and terror

By Hunter Bush

Watching Neill Blomkamp’s latest, Demonic, all I could focus on was what it reminded me of and I found myself struggling to engage with it. With a setup heavily reminiscent of Tarsem Singh’s 2000 thriller The Cell, and a finale that leans heavily on a sequence borrowed from Jonathan Demme’s 1991 classic Silence of the Lambs (with assorted other equally familiar components in the middle), I just couldn’t find a way into caring about the story.

This is Blomkamp’s first feature in 6 years, during which time he’s directed over a dozen shorts of varying lengths, themes and quality. The shorts, all viewable through his OATS Studios banner, are exercises in effects-based filmmaking but in some instances are little more than proof-of-concept trailers for some effects engine or idea. Not that there’s anything wrong with that; Blomkamp’s films and concepts are historically extremely effects-dependent, so working out the kinks before devoting innumerable hours, dollars and mental energy to a project is really smart. Unfortunately, Demonic feels like one of those proof-of-concept shorts, just longer.

Carly (Carly Pope) hasn’t spoken to her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt) in years, but when she’s contacted by former childhood friend Martin (Chris William Martin) he reveals that Angela is in a coma, and is part of an unusual medical technology trial. Soon Carly is working with the Therapol organization, being digitally projected into Angela’s unconscious mind in an attempt to reconcile… or is there a more nefarious reason? There is, and it’s actually pretty fun, in a big, silly way.

Neill Blomkamp loves video games. He was working on an adaptation of the Halo game franchise way back when and after that fell apart, he folded in concepts he’d been workshopping for that into, apocryphally, both District 9 and Elysium. He’s also directed shorts set in both the Halo and Anthem video game universes and as of this year is working for/with a game developer called Gunzilla. He’s just openly and obviously a gamer, so it isn’t really a surprise that one of the aspects of Demonic that works best for me feels like the setup for a pretty fun game: Action Priests! Tactical Exorcists!

The doctors of Therapol Medical are actually “Vatican funded, black ops, demon hunting priests” (I’m paraphrasing Martin, but those are the bulletpoints) and that ...kind of rules, right? It’s a bit like Constantine crossed with Call of Duty. All the priests are heavily armed, well-trained, and revealed to be covered in tattoos and/or ritualistic looking scarification and, while silly like I said, still could be fun if Demonic leaned into it or made this concept more of a focal point.

Because the thing is while Angela is guilty of the crimes she was charged with, her actions aren’t the result of some form of mental illness but rather demonic possession, and that unnamed demon must be Tactically Exorcised! No spoilers, but if at the end of Demonic, Carly had joined up with the Action Priests in a sort of Men in Black-esque origin story, all set to be franchised into the near future, I’d probably have been happier. As it is, the Action Priests are almost an afterthought; a deus ex machina to put Carly into a shared dreamspace not unlike J.Lo entering comatose serial killer Vincent D’Onofrio’s mind in The Cell, only instead of a surreal landscape inspired by works of art, it kind of looks like Far Cry. That’s not inherently a dig. Obviously Niell Blomkamp and Tarsem Singh are very different filmmakers with different visual languages and goals, but if you’re trying to wow me with the spectacle of a thing, some level from a Far Cry game just ain’t cutting it.

This was supposedly filmed “in secret during the quarantine” and it honestly has that kind of “Fuck it. Let’s just make a thing since we have all this forced free time” energy. To that end it feels very like Host from director Rob Savage in that both films hinge on how well they use special effects but where Host knew exactly what it needed to tell its story, and did so with a minimum of exposition, Demonic kind of can’t stop explaining things we just don’t need explained.

I consider myself a fan of Neill Blomkamp in that I like more about his filmography than I dislike but there’s just not much to get enthused about as a viewer. It might be technologically impressive, but it should also be engaging. For a movie with a mother/daughter central relationship that’s so emotionally fraught, Carly’s interactions with Angela carry almost no weight, and it isn’t the fault of either actor. It just feels like that aspect clearly wasn’t where the director’s focus lay.

Demonic isn’t bad, but it isn’t very memorable and didn’t leave me feeling as impressed as I take it I’m supposed to. I sincerely hope it won’t be another half decade until Blomkamp directs a feature again, but I hope the next one has substance beyond the special effects; some steak underneath all that sizzle.

Demonic is in theaters and in VOD August 20th
OATS Studios / youtube