Friday, 25 March 2022

VOD: Demonic (dir: Neill Blomkamp, 2021)

"I saw things..."

Director/writer Neill Blomkamp's first real horror film ticks as many boxes as it can, as a woman learns that her estranged felon mother is in a coma at a cutting-edge medical tech facility and is asked to communicate with the patient via VR.  Shot during the pandemic, the film is clearly limited in scale and low-budget and contains a lot of slow wandering around (almost found-footage in style at times, especially in the final act), but it does try  to give an original spin on the demonic possession genre, even if feels way too late to the party.  In the lead role, Carly Pope is solid and keeps things reasonably grounded, and Blomkamp occasionally shows some visual style that he often uses to elevate fairly ordinary material, but overall what we end up with is an efficient if rather limited and routine schlocker.

 

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