Neill Blomkamp affirms again with “Demonic,” his least entertaining feature film yet, that he is a true mad scientist with genre even if everything blows up in his face. His convictions can be truly bizarre, like with something as small as Jodie Foster’s peculiar accent in “Elysium” or the entirety of “Chappie.” Whether one likes those movies or not, it’s unmistakable that Blomkamp believes in what he’s toying with and that such confidence defines his artistry when creating his mark in the crowded world of sci-fi. But Blomkamp continues to baffle even more with “Demonic,” as he’s made a horror film that is so rote it’s hardly scary, all to showcase a developing technology that is intriguing as a sales pitch but unconvincing as a narrative device.
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“Demonic” unfolds like Blomkamp really just wanted to experiment with this volumetric capture technology, which essentially creates the image of virtual reality with cameras, not a headset. For the 20 approximate minutes of “Demonic” that use this method, 260 cameras were utilized to photograph a body that could then be placed in an animated space. But instead of treating this technology with only a short writer/director, Blomkamp has put it at the center of an awfully familiar modern horror project. As if encouraged by the many other recent movies that have also discussed mental illness and one’s fear of their parents, Blomkamp makes a more literal story about a woman named Carly (Carly Pope) going inside the mind of her comatose mother, Angela (Nathalie Boltt), who has an incredibly violent history of harm to others and herself. A new shady scientific entity called Therapol has been working with Angela and mapping out her mind. Still, they need Carly to travel through whatever landscapes are built from repressed memories to find the actual demon that is within Angela.
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Blomkamp remains fixated on the non-technological miracle that is human consciousness—continued from his battles between man vs. alien or man vs. robot in the likes of his sci-fi action movies “District 9” and “Chappie.” A trip inside Angela’s tortured mind of uncertain corners offers all of cinema, not just his tumultuous own, a new way of depicting this idea of conscience, with broadly colored landscapes that appear life-like and animated at the same time. And just like how the workers Therapol people see it, sometimes we get an overhead view of Carly as she wanders around like a character in “The Sims.”
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It’s movie history right before our eyes, and yet it’s one of the film’s revealing shortcomings that the volumetric capture is not all that charismatic, that it provides little of its own wonder from a film enamored with it. Instead, “Demonic” seems mostly concerned with normalizing volumetric capture, to show us a character like Carly with her hair and body suitably flickering like a computer image not fully loaded, and to plant the idea of what such a sequence in film looks like in general. “Demonic” proves to be a bizarre way for Blomkamp to call authorship dibs on a technology that still has more evolving to do.
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The narrative focus here of exploring a parent’s mental illness, in such Blomkamp fashion, comes off as superficial, as much as Spencer tries to make Carly’s alternating hatred and fear of her mother visceral on her volumetrically captured face. Spencer’s work is overwhelmed by the script’s constant need to explain itself, in leaden moments of backstory and science that similarly flatten performances from other actors working with bar characters. “Demonic” is truly like watching someone else play a video game, which is no longer the diss it used to be. But it’s more that Blomkamp packs “Demonic” with far more cut scenes than gameplay, and that when it does come down to the film’s exploratory passages, the terrain of a wide-open field, a ghoulishly empty childhood home, or a mysterious tunnel are uninspiring set-pieces. The film later distinguishes by flipping its setting upside down, reflecting the tumultuous relationship between Carly and Angela, but it’s too little, too late.
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Blomkamp’s script also finds no spark the more it rips from the playbook of horror visual tropes, especially when its action takes place outside of Angela’s consciousness. When one character suddenly starts contorting their limbs and crawling backward, it’s the opposite of unsettling due to being so played out; the same goes for jump scares that wind up a gory or freaky image before revealing that it was just a dream. Every time someone explains the history of the demonic force at hand, it becomes all the more clear how much Blomkamp is trying to BS his way through horror storytelling or that he took the wrong lessons from other horror staples.
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It’s exciting, at least before one hits play on “Demonic,” to imagine Blomkamp branching off to different genres. But Blomkamp goes missing in numerous chapters of “Demonic,” as if the movie were performative about mimicking plenty of other modern but bland indie horrors currently available on demand. When his compelling, specific interests do arise, it can be mighty underwhelming or disastrous. For good measure, he finds a way to get a gung-ho, military-like force team locked and loaded for some supernatural ass-kicking, just like all of his previous features—in a twist, I won’t spoil—but he self-sabotages himself by not letting us savor their over-the-top potential. Given the other action that happens in the movie involving its ho-hum demonic force, it’s not like it would have been impossible. Blomkamp cheats himself out of what could have easily been one of his more creative scenes within a baffling movie that’s only experimental, original, and interesting for approximately 20 minutes. [C-]
