Mark Reviews Movies: DEMONIC

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 19, 2021

Writer/director Neill Blomkamp adds a technological hook to a tale of demonic possession. Demonic, though, doesn't know what to do with its central gimmick or the underlying horror story.

The technology aspect, which could be described as a kind of fully-immersive virtual reality, mostly exists as a tool for exposition, so it's little more than a stylish distraction. Once the movie enters the realm of more straightforward horror in the real world, it's little more than a series of jump scares, fake-outs, and the occasional appearance of a rather silly-looking demon. All of those predictable moments are interrupted by even more explanatory scenes—characters awkwardly dumping details about what's happening in rote monologues, as well as even more wooden dialogue, and flashbacks for a few key points of back story.

Blomkamp's few intriguing ideas—either because they do possess some legitimate promise or because they're completely ludicrous—are ultimately overshadowed by the overly familiar scare tactics and exposition or left so underdeveloped that they really mean little to the story. The whole affair is a series of missed opportunities after missed opportunities, leaving us with a movie that, apart from a few surface-level trappings, doesn't do anything new—and doesn't do any of the old stuff well.

The story focuses on Carly (Carly Pope), a pretty ordinary woman with a terrible and not-so-secret familial history. That comes to light when she receives a random text message from an estranged friend named Martin (Chris William Martin). It's about her mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt), who had been in prison for a couple decades but, as Martin reveals, is now in a clinic—and in a coma.

A doctor from that clinic soon contacts Carly, hoping that she'll help the clinic's research into her mother's condition. As for how doctors Michael (Michael J. Rogers) and Daniel (Terry Chen) plan to accomplish that, the clinic uses a revolutionary technology that visualizes the inside of a person's mind and can allow another person to visit it. They'll hook Carly up to a bunch of sensors and what-nots, and she'll be able to see what her mother is thinking and have a conversation with Angela.

All of this is, on a plot level, fairly mysterious and, visually, a bit neat, as Blomkamp puts a fuzzy and warped version of Carly through a virtual world of Angela's past dreams and, later, darkest sins. The filmmaker clearly wants to highlight the technology used to create these sequences, so much of those scenes amounts to Carly walking through the computer-generated spaces toward an inevitable confrontation with her mother. From there, we learn that Carly hates Angela for what she did. A second trip into the virtual space reveals that something supernaturally evil may have been the real cause of Angela's awful crimes.

After that, the screenplay falls into total routine. Carly starts feeling a wicked presence around her, begins having nightmares, and fears that the demon—a gangly, black figure with an oversized bird head—might harm her or her friends. As for the friends, Martin exists to explain his theory that the clinic is actually a front for an elite unit of priests, organized by the Vatican to find and destroy demons (There's a scene that reveals this as the truth, as a bunch of priests arms themselves with guns and daggers and the Bible, and it's such a ridiculous concept that Blomkamp's failure to do anything with it is quite disappointing). Another friend, named Sam (Kandyse McClure), toys with Carly in a nightmare, before she becomes a completely disposable proof of the demon's intentions.

This, obviously, means a lot of scenes of Carly being scared by something that isn't there or is harmless (One of those false scares relies on us believing that a demon would simply knock on Carly's door, which is a silly assumption on Blomkamp's part—and only sillier when it turns out to be the truth). Mix those with a few only-a-dream reveals and a climax built around a demon chasing, attacking, and hopping between bodies through a generically murky backdrop of hallways, and the filmmaker shows that all of his potentially unique ideas have been spent by the end of the first act.

By now, that seems to be a pattern for Blomkamp, who can hook us with a clever premise and/or a fascinating world, before disappointing the premise, the movie's world, and us. Demonic features the least clever of his setups, so at least the sense of disappointment is minimized, if only because the movie seems like a dead-end from the start.

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