Demonlover Movie Review:


This global thriller seriously plays with your head, kind of like Antonioni's 1960s classic Blow Up, refusing to resolve itself into something clear-cut. But the approach is assured and intelligent, and it helps us identify sharply with the central character. When we meet Diane (Nielsen), she's an assured businesswoman up to something extremely nefarious in her efforts to get to the seat of power in her company. Then as the story progresses, wrinkles are revealed about Diane, her coworker Herve (Berling) and their assistant Elise (Sevigny), all of whom are hiding secrets as they jet around the world trying to finalise a contract involving the Demonlover adult-anime website, while fending off a takeover from a voracious American (Gershon). And the deeper into the rabbit hole that Diane goes, the more confusing the world around her becomes, until life starts to blur with the sinister online world she uncovers.

The first half of the film is lively and enticing, drawing us in with Denis Lenoir's sleek cinematography and Assayas' intriguing storytelling as we gradually learn more about what these people are up to. Then Assayas starts making things darker, more jittery, sexy and grisly, and extremely unsettling. His seductive shooting style shifts with Diane's moods, and Nielsen gives a wrenching performance as a control freak who's slowly being stripped of her ability to manage the world around her. The whole cast is fascinatingly enigmatic, continually surprising us with little (or not-so-little) revelations--a tiny look here, a bold action there. Sevigny and Berling are perfect in extremely tricky roles. Meanwhile, Assayas takes us from Japan to France to Mexico, blending manic action with scenes of mundane life that are almost overpoweringly loaded with subtext. By the end we're completely drained, trying to get to grips with the final truth Diane discovers, as well as the well-aimed gut-punch Assayas saves for the very end. There's not a particularly big twist, and at one point the film gets so confusing and repetitive that we lose the ability to care what's happening, but it's still a bracingly offbeat thriller.

Rich Cline

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