Demonic (2021)

Please excuse my attempts at humor. It's a defensive reaction.

I really, really wanted to like this film. It has been on my watchlist for like 3 years, and I was constantly checking on it. I hoped for Wan as a director, but when I saw Blomkamp, I was pleasantly surprised. I wouldn't say I liked Elysium, but I think Neill is a talented director.

With that being said, I give this film a lot of credit and a 6/10. It had its moments, but the negatives overcame the positives. As more people will watch it, I think it will drop down to ~5.5 or less.

There were three major problems for me:

1) the dialogue was unbearable most of the time;

2) the amounts of exposition thrown in these were overwhelming. The story comes to a halt for 10-15 minutes, and then BOOM, you get bombarded with information the characters share (the things they already know btw). And it's not that confusing to provide this much flashback.

3) the whole technology/occult combination was fresh, but when they tell you the point of all that, it just becomes a laughable excuse and an insane over-complication of what could have been done.

Throw in some heavy continuity, and the majority of the viewers will probably dislike this. The ending clearly shows that at least 10-15 minutes of it was missing, the main lead teleports way too much, and some scenes end abruptly.

I want to mention some positives as well, the film did look good, and I enjoyed the ending night scenes. I constantly felt like I'm giving this film much more creditworthiness than it's worth, but I saw some potential in it.

And yeah, while interesting in their looks, the simulation scenes lacked creativity, and the entity of which we got no information looks like Radament from Diablo 2.

Overall, this is not a horror film. And as much as I appreciate the effort, I didn't like it as much as I wanted to.

Fmovies: Nah...couldn't have been...this was low budge messiness...rushed ideas, no vision and some silly dialogue....or better yet what I like to call "nothing talk"...it's almost as if he was contracted to make a movie to pay back the studio ??

The main reason I was interested in this film was Neill Blomkamp, who is finally back to making feature films after a 6-years-long pause. After two forays into blockbuster territory, he's back with indie horror and I was very curious how he would approach the genre. The title is very generic and if it wasn't for Blomkamp, I probably would have skipped this one. Plus, it is hard to make a genuinely fresh and interesting horror movie today and Blomkamp almost succeeds, but not all the way through.

It starts out very interesting. The story is intriguing and good acting helped giving it the proper emotion. The simulation scenes are easily the best and most interesting parts of the film, but that aspect of the story is done by the midpoint and only comes back once more in the climax. This is largely why the latter half of the film was disappointing. Plus, something about the writing and sometimes even acting just wasn't on the same level anymore. If the plot was more focused on the initial concept and explored the simulation more, it would have made for a lot more interesting film. This way, we get one amazing scene in the climax and then the rest of it is drawn out and clichéd. However, the design of the demon was very good and there were several genuinely frightening scenes. What's even better is that the demon is obscured most of the time, which makes it all the more creepy. There are a few jumpscares, but Blomkamp doesn't rely on that to much. Instead, he relies on the power of disturbing imagery, which is worthy of respect when many other directors would go for a cheap and sudden booming sound.

All in all, the film could have been a lot better than it ended up being, but it is certainly not bad. With an interesting concept and character design, it is unique enough to stand out among the crowd of other demonic possession horror films. After this, I'm excited to see what Blomkamp does next.

Demonic fmovies. You'll know it's bad when they enter a VR world in someone's mind. Monster wasn't very scary. Poor Neil, guy needs a hit and this ain't it.

Feels like a bad Black Mirror episode. I love Blomkamp's work but this was a misfire.

Genuinely one of the worst films I have ever seen. Wooden acting, no scares, action from the trailer was the only action in the movie. Priests the only interesting characters and are barely in it. Time and money I won't get back.