Demonic Review: Neil Blomkamp’s Horror Movie Has Scary Ideas Going Nowhere

At one point during the trailer for Demonic, the new horror movie by District 9 writer and director Neill Blomkamp, ​​one character tells another, “The Vatican has been funding a black ops unit. Using priests as soldiers. ”That standout premise, with an army of secret armed exorcists fighting a shadow war against demons, is unfortunately not what Demonic it’s about. Instead, it is primarily a family drama with interesting ideas that are completely ignored.

Demonic It is about a woman named Carly (Carly Pope), who is not a priest of arms, and her estranged mother Angela (Nathalie Boltt). Angela was sent to prison when Carly was younger, and has since slipped into a coma and been taken in by a group of researchers for experimental virtual reality therapy. After a series of complicated conversations, Carly ends up at the research group base, hooked up with new technology that allows her to enter her mother’s therapeutic coma simulation. In this virtual space, Carly wants to face the trauma of her family, but her mother warns her that it is not safe to be in the simulation. When Carly leaves, she discovers that a demon has escaped and chases her.

The simulation is DemonicIt’s the first big missed opportunity, and it only takes about 15 minutes to get there. Carly was told that the places she visits in virtual reality will not appear as they really are, but rather as her mother remembers them. At first this seems like a setup for some strangeness, something to finally bring the movie to real horror. But it turns out that Carly’s mother remembers things quite well. There are no strange angles to its scratch world, or lurid dazzling architecture, and rarely spatial impossibilities or haunting dream logic. These are mostly ordinary houses and buildings with little slightly crooked furniture, all rendered in CGI that make Xbox 360 games look cutting edge.

What’s worse, none of these trips to the simulation feel particularly justified in its low-resolution digital aspect or connected to the rest of the film. They don’t feel like part of a horror movie and they don’t involve deep or interesting conversations. Despite the fact that the story is linked to a demon, it does not speak of the nature of souls or evil. There are hardly any mentions of God, or even the devil himself. Almost all of the scenes within the simulation are just regular family drama dialogue, set within computer-generated locations for reasons that aren’t entirely clear.

The rest of the film suffers from this same sense of confusion. When Carly is out of the simulation, she and her childhood friends Martin (Chris Martin) and Sam (Kandyse McClure) have conversations that are extraordinarily mundane and somewhat boring, or very specific plot explanations. Even the film’s only solid horror sequence, a chase inside Carly’s house, mistreats the elements of horror. Startups happen too sooner or later, ruining the moment every time. These sequences are awkward, not in the manner of a horror movie, but like Blomkamp, ​​he’s not completely comfortable working on the genre and playing by its rules.

The only really creepy element in the movie is the score. Ola Strandh, who has worked primarily on video games such as Division 2 in the past, he creates a haunting electronic soundtrack that underlines the entire movie. His music does most of the heavy lifting for the film’s best horror attempts, and his careful combination of electronic instrumentation and quiet strings is the only thing that makes sense of the film’s themes (to be generous): digital ghosts that they stalk the real. world.

When the black ops priests finally show up, about two-thirds of the way through the movie, it seems like the story is finally about to get more interesting, and we’re finally getting the action horror movie we’ve got. been setting up for an hour. But that doesn’t happen either. The bullet exorcist squad just disappears. Instead Demonic he commits to a final half hour that feels more like a monster movie than an exorcism story, but the demon also feels out of place in the physical world. Its raven skull design is fine enough for a few scares, but the more human version is too dull to be scary.

Demonic It’s a frustrating movie, because despite all the problems, the world that Blomkamp sets up is exciting and original. The idea of ​​exorcisms in the near future in a militant sci-fi world, where even the church has a SWAT team, and demons can use virtual reality as a bridge into physical space, is fascinating. The idea of ​​a person trapped in a coma and forced into a virtual reality nightmare in the name of science is terrifying. But instead of those big ideas, Blomkamp grafts an uninteresting family drama on top and then makes the entirety of Demonic on that skin instead of digging into the flesh.

Demonic is already available in cinemas or is available to rent on digital platforms such as Amazon Y Voodoo.