On the one hand, Demonlover is a superficially-dull film about corporate espionage that takes a turn for the dark and twisted in the second half (although there is one crime committed very early on that should clue viewers in to where this particular journey is going). On the other hand, Demonlover is intriguingly transgressive and focused on the main thesis from writer-director Olivier Assayas.
Connie Nielsen plays Diane, a woman who arranges to take over from her superior, Karen (Dominique Reymond), as the company she works for prepares to acquire rights from a Japanese anime company that will given them ownership of a hell of a lot of hentai. And when they have the product, they need to sort out distribution. Which leads them to delve deeper into the murky depths of the internet.
Whether you like his films or not, and I often like them (with the exception of Boarding Gate), Assayas is a director who always seems to take on projects that allow him to explore something he feels genuinely invested in. That may be the blurred lines between fiction and non-fiction, the power of grief, a turbulent part of history, or the difficulty of ageing within a movie industry that almost always values youth and image above everything else. This time around, his focus is on how we consume media, and how easy it is to feel free to do anything while enjoying anonymity.
What could have so easily been a “do you know where your kids are?” scare piece about the perils of the internet, and we have a number of those already (some of which remain mind-bogglingly highly praised), instead becomes a look at how things can be amplified, online and on screens, for people who have already been acclimatized to more extreme content, resulting in an unending, and unsatisfying, search for the next thing that can seize the attention of consumers. Although less feverish, this feels like an interesting step along from Videodrome, the two covering some similar ground, albeit with different formats at the heart of things.
Nielsen is very good in her role, surprisingly effective at being thoroughly nasty and easy to dislike. There’s also a strong supporting turn from Chloë Sevigny, and Gina Gershon steals a couple of scenes when she appears about a third of the way into the runtime. Charles Berling is the least known (to me) of the main players, but he does a good job in the role of Hervé, the boss who doesn’t realise the real agendas of a number of people working for him.
There’s an excellent soundtrack to help things along, particularly in the first half when things seem happier and less grimy, and a third act that skirts very close to outright horror. Overall, this is a pretty great film that only suffers from the fact that Assayas didn’t dive fully into genre. But, then again, Assayas has rarely let himself be confined by typical genre parameters.
8/10
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