THE DEMON DISORDER - Mark Reviews Movies

The Demon Disorder, Shudder

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Review by Mark Dujsik | September 5, 2024

Co-writer/director Steven Boyle has a long list of credits working in special effects for more than 20 years. The Demon Disorder is his debut as a director, wherein he definitely puts that past experience to use. The effects here, most of them practical and quite disgusting at times, are the highlight of a movie that can't quite figure out what to do with them.

The story certainly hints at and touches upon some unsettling ideas about family, grief, guilt, and the hereditary nature of all sorts of possible metaphors for what's eating at its central characters. It all revolves around the death of a trio of brothers' father, whom we first see chained to a bed in a cramped room in a remote house. The man is not well, to say the least.

George (John Noble), the father, has raised his three sons on his own for decades, it seems, and after that brief prologue in which the man recites Bible verses and flashes a rather sinister-looking face at one of his sons, we learn that George has died. One of the sons, named Graham (Christian Willis), left that isolated home almost immediately and has been living in the auto shop owned and operated by the family. He has no thoughts of returning home anytime soon, if ever.

That changes, though, when his brother Jake (Dirk Hunter) arrives at the garage, giving him some tough words about abandoning Jake, as well as their youngest brother Phillip (Charles Cottier), in such a miserable place with so many bad memories. Graham points out that his brothers could leave, too, but financial constraints make that impossible in Jake's mind. Plus, there's a new complication: Phillip has started behaving in a way that reminds Jake of the father.

In case the title and that opening scene haven't made it clear, the problem here has to do with demonic possession. Sure, Boyle and Toby Osborne's screenplay toys around with some more realistic possibilities, such as empty bottles of alcohol lying around George, as well as Jake's own copious drinking, and a late scene in which the father confides to his sons that he's ill with some degenerative ailment that will make him forget more and more as time passes.

What's strange about such grounding factors in the narrative is that they feel removed from everything else in the tale. From the start, we know what's affecting George and will come affect Phillip—as well as, perhaps, one of the other brothers. It's not booze, and despite the last-minute effort to connect this supernatural threat to an illness of the mind, it's not dementia, either.

No, it's just a demon or some less-spiritual entity that acts like one, meaning it is one for all practical matters. It possessed and/or infected George, and now, it has its hold on Phillip, who seems fine when Graham returns to the house to help Jake with their brother. That's the case, at least, until Graham finds Phillip in the middle of night killing and eating chickens in the coop—just as their father did at some point in the assorted flashbacks of Graham remembering how bad things became with his old man.

The rest of the story is pretty routine and, since it does basically amount to waiting for the demon to get its hooks fully into Phillip and/or someone else, without much surprise. Graham and Jake bicker over what's to be done with their brother, since they can't call anyone, lest the secrets of the family and what actually happened with George get out, and they don't want what did happen to their father to happen to their kid brother. That restriction becomes less feasible in the third act, when the screenplay comes up with a vague excuse for changing the scenery. The shift doesn't really change anything, except to add a few more complications to the brothers' efforts to get the demon out of Phillip.

It does emerge earlier and more frequently than one might anticipate from this setup, and such moments are when we can really see Boyle's intentions with this material. Whatever's inside Phillip is quite physically inside him, pulsing beneath his skin before the brothers manage to pull it out of his mouth. The creature looks like a sizeable slug, covered in pustules and capable of sneaking away before anyone can catch it. There's some appreciated humor to certain elements here, such as when Graham and Jake try to catch the evil thing with whatever they can find—in one case, a broom and a plastic bag.

The special effects are convincing and occasionally grotesque, such as when a blinking—or, technically, winking—eyeball appears inside a bite wound and Boyle reveals why a spot under Phillip's arm looks as infected as it does. That all of this practical-effects trickery ultimately results in a final showdown, featuring characters doing things and showing up only to make it all more convoluted, is to be expected.

It's still disappointing, though, because The Demon Disorder does suggest a darker and more human story in between the obvious beats of its plot. Instead, they turn out to be nothing more than suggestions, adding no depth to a story that's just about a gross, gooey monster.

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