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Demonlover (2002) More at IMDbPro »

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59 reviews in total

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51 out of 55 people found the following review useful:
Criminally Underrated, 24 April 2004

Author: arturobandini from Burbank, CA

Admittedly, DEMONLOVER makes a sharp left narrative turn at the halfway point that's going to confound viewers who are intrigued by the straightforward (and extremely absorbing) high-stakes opening. But that's no reason to dismiss the many, many things that writer/director Olivier Assayas gets absolutely right. In the end, DEMONLOVER is a fascinating mirror-world reflection (as William Gibson would call it) of where our global society might be just five minutes from now: the fittest who survive will be multilingual, career-consumed and ridiculously chic, but also soulless, as if missing the gene that supplies a sense of loyalty and ethics. The movie is a cautionary, though entirely plausible, tale of humans debased by their own lust for ungoverned capitalism. Every line of dialogue is about the business merger at hand; in the rare instances where feelings are discussed, they're usually about how *work* affects those emotions. The big wink here is that the characters don't even discuss business honestly, because each has duplicitous motives.

Technically, DEMONLOVER is a feast. Denis Lenoir's widescreen photography constantly dazzles -- many of the tracking shots are sustained in close-up (creating paranoia), and the color spectrum appears as if filtered through corporate fluorescence. (The neon-drenched Tokyo sequence is particularly hypnotic.) Jump cuts keep the narrative one step ahead of the audience. Sonic Youth's atonal guitar score creates the same mutant environment that Howard Shore pulled off in CRASH. Most significantly, Connie Nielsen's face (and hair and wardrobe) mesmerizes more than any CGI I've ever seen. Considering the labyrinthine motives of her character, Nielsen's exquisite subtlety may be lost on first-time viewers; on second look, her emotionless gaze speaks volumes.

Audiences (and critics) have unanimously attacked the `problematic' second half as an example of directorial self-indulgence. While I agree that it's not as satisfying as the first half, I don't think it's a total crash-and-burn (pardon the pun). Clearly, the ending is open to thematic interpretation, but I think Assayas is just saying that if our species isn't more careful, we'll end up like one-dimensional characters in a video game of our own devising - sure, winner takes all, but the rest of us suffer enormously.

Narrative ambiguity aside, DEMONLOVER is the great Hitchcockian/Cronenbergian espionage fantasia I've been waiting for. It makes sense that it would come from Europe, since Hollywood forgot long ago how to make their assembly-line genre exercises intellectually stimulating. (Like the animé porn within the story, Hollywood movies today represent no more than a calculated corporate commodity.) More than any other film from the last 2½ years, DEMONLOVER seems a product of the post-9/11 world - a not-so-distant future where overwhelming paranoia goads us to preemptively eliminate any form of potential competition before it can do the same to us. And how in doing so, we devour our own tail.

I expect this movie's reputation will grow by leaps and bounds in the coming years.

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28 out of 31 people found the following review useful:
Bleak vision, very good movie, 16 October 2003

Author: panspermia from United States

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

First off, the movie's plot DOES make sense. I'll address that below, after the Spoiler Alert.

It's a very interesting movie, thematically, visually, aurally. I summarize the theme as `Who's the top now.' (By `top' I refer to the sadomasochistic term for the dominant partner.) It sees corporate life, in particular, and modern Western culture, in general, as a soulless contest for dominance among individuals, who have no meaningful connection to other people beyond the dominance-submission relationship. Life has been reduced to a video game, in which winning is everything; consequently, life has been reduced to something as "spiritually" and socially empty as a video game. Demonlover is a serious condemnation of the culture we shaped and which in turn shapes us.

Much of the camerawork is relentlessly close-up. There are even relatively long tracking shots where you never have enough distance to see in any one frame much more than a hand, or a skirt, or a car door. It makes the movie exciting to watch, even when all you're watching are yuppies negotiating or driving from one place to another. It also helps present the theme of characters with no moral distance from what they're doing, with no `perspective.' It makes everything Go-Go-Go, just like in a video game, where something is always coming at you, or like in the `go-go' make-a-buck corporate world.

Nobody has faulted the acting. Nielsen is great, a desirable top in the first half, if ever I've seen one! And I've never seen Berling before, but I'd be happy just watching that pleasant slimeball eat and talk for thirty minutes straight. (If you cast HIM in My Dinner with Andre it would instantly have a voluptuously seamy quality!)

As for the pornography scenes, Assayas shows almost nothing. It's an especially NON-explicit movie. Not only is it neither erotic nor titillating, it actually shows less graphic violence, sex, and nudity than the average R-rated movie these days. It is not at all `exploitative.' Critics are taking offense at the meaning and implications of what is shown, not at the graphic content.

SPOILERS BELOW

I've seen reviews that think the plot falls apart after `the first half,' which means after Gershon and Nielsen fight. What happens is that both women black out, and then Sevigny and cohorts clean up the mess, perhaps dispose of Gershon (it doesn't matter), and `rescue' Nielsen. Then she finds out that Sevigny ALSO is an undercover agent. Sevigny in the meantime, while Nielsen is knocked out, has managed to climb the corporate ladder, so that their roles are reversed – both at Volf AND as spies for Magnatronics. (Maybe Sevigny worked for Magnatronics from the start, or maybe she was co-opted later; it doesn't matter.) As someone playing her role in a dominance-submission relationship, she is then stuck as a submissive, and acts it. It's not out of character. She is just no longer the top she thought she was.

The plot doesn't go haywire; it's just that Assayas has fun with us, as we find out that Karen is familiar with the ways of Magnatronics and then, finally, that Sevigny actually works for Berling. In other words, EVERYONE we've met at Volf, except Volf himself, is actually an undercover agent. The company is a shell full of people who are not on its side, who are only out for themselves and are, through greed and deceitfulness, actually in the employ of their employer's enemy. Just as the society is shown to have no values outside of individual success and dominance, so it is shown, to an absurd extreme, within the analogue of the Volf Corporation. The DNA molecule at the end of the movie fits this theme: stripped of the overlay of cultural illusions, it's all just survival of the fittest, each gene-set for itself.

Finally, I want to comment that Nielsen's reaction to Berling in the bed scene makes sense, too. While who is the dominant is undecided, she seems to be into the sex, undoing his belt, etc. But then he asserts his dominance, and the scene turns into a rape. They couldn't really have balanced consensual sex, since it's about winning, not about love. Hence he takes the dominant role, forcing intercourse (even though she clearly was heading there anyway!). Next it's her turn to `win,' his having just trumped her with male physical strength: she uses the equalizer.

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18 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
Ghosts In the Machine, 4 October 2003
Author: mjmkeating

One of the great things about the French is their interest and promotion of THEORY. Sometimes when theory infiltrates Art in too direct a manner the results can be boring or pretentious. In the case of demonlover neither is the case yet the end product doesn't measure up to its individual parts which are brilliant. Suffice it to say this is not a movie for the squeamish or for fans of the character building qualities of a life in business. What the film shows is how much of a construct modern identity is; how much it depends on role, on possessions, on our relationship to the pecking order of whatever tribe we find ourselves in. The film also suggests that the price we pay for hanging on to this fragile identity is nothing less than the seeds of our destruction - a doorway in fact to depression, madness and perversion. Lastly, the film is a devastating look at the way big media corporations hide their involvement in anti-social projects under the veneer of 'just business' or, if they went to the Harvard Business School, 'shareholder value'. Its a rare thing to make an interesting movie with NO sympathetic characters but demonlover achieves this. Many complaints have been launched against the incoherent plot, but the fact is that the plot is not incoherent at all, it just lacks credibility which is a different matter altogether. But no matter: its still an interesting take on a very real set of contemporary circumstances. The performances are also quite compelling which suggests that no matter how dubious a character's morality is, if she's beautiful we (men, that is) will hang on her every word.

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28 out of 43 people found the following review useful:
Beautiful People in a Floaty Dance of Nothing, 26 April 2004
Author: sinistre1111 from Kasparhauser, NJ, USA

I must slam this film if only to reclaim the 90 minutes or so that I cannot ever regain (I ffwd through the last half hour.) The Mrs. and I loved Irma Vep and were intrigued enough by the premise and cast of Demonlover to have a look. This film has an excellent look and feel, so you're taken in at first, until you realize there's no real reason for any of the action and you dislike all the characters, and that's just dislike, because you're not really involved enough to actually HATE them. The music selection is cool, the film even opens with a song by the legendarily obscure German band NEU! The clothes are fab, the whole thing is lit in a cool blue half the time, but the story is a wispy corporate spy drama, with its meat drawn straight from the screenplay of Videodrome. At first we thought we were enjoying ourselves, but ultimately Demonlover is a tired lay.

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16 out of 23 people found the following review useful:
c'mon people, it's NOT the worst film ever, 21 July 2004
Author: muerco from California

If a movie upsets this many people (check the reviews below), there must be something to it. Perhaps people are reacting to the insidiousness of the world of corporate espionage, pornography, lovelessness, pleasurelessness, etc. on display in every corner of the movie. Although its final 30 minutes or so veer toward incoherence--the meaning of what ultimately happens seems less interesting as a resolution than in (for example) "Mulholland Drive"--it's a cool, controlled, provocative rethinking of the modern techno thriller. It's a far more subtle and nuanced movie than the kind of head trip movies that kids go for these days ("Requiem for a Dream," bleh!), and the Sonic Youth score and cinematography are terrific.

I was originally attracted to the film on the strengths of Assayas' other films--all three I've seen ("Irma Vep", "Late August/Early Sept.", "Les Destinees Sentimentales") excellent and each in its own way unique. His work is eclectic and unpredictable in the best sense, seemingly at ease with big or small productions--in the great tradition of Jonathan Demme or Michael Winterbottom or Louis Malle. This is probably the only one of his films so far that could have attracted an American audience, but the chilliness of its surfaces apparently has scared a few too many away. It's a pity, because the film's definitely worth seeing.

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8 out of 10 people found the following review useful:
Beautiful murk, but still murk, 16 October 2003
Author: Chris Knipp from Berkeley, California

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

[WARNING: SPOILERS]

Olivier Assayas' Demonlover begins as a handsome-looking corporate techno thriller that ranges between France, Japan, and the US and involves cutthroat executives from all three countries speaking all three languages who start out cutting deals and wind up cutting throats. Two products are involved, soft-core porn Japanese animé, of which the new version is 3-D, and a well concealed S & M website that appears to provide the infliction of real physical pain to order. It's a beautiful but too self-indulgent film that ends in utter confusion.

As the film begins, a few executives of a French conglomerate called VolfGroup go to Japan and arrange to buy out TokyoAnimé, whose new 3-D manga porn films are going to wipe out all competition. TokyoAnimé needs the French money to develop their new 3-D technology. Diane (Connie Nielson) drugs a rival in the company to operate beside Hervé (Charles Berling) in these negotiations.

Meanwhile two companies are battling for the rights to Volf's new images on the Web: Mangatronics and Demonlover, and it turns out Mangatronics has recruited Diane to sabotage Demonlover from the inside.

This develops after the French return from their deal in Tokyo and are visited by Demonlover representatives from the USA who're a boorish lot dominated by Elaine (Gina Gershon, seen here as a tattooed, pot smoking babe). Diane sneaks up on Elaine and tries to off her -- or maybe she succeeds -- but no, because she pops right up again, as in a video game.

The S & M website, known as ‘The Hellfire Club,' also belongs to Demonlover, although its reps vehemently deny that. The Hellfire Club keeps coming up and figures prominently at the end – which is strange since Hervé has told the Japanese VolfGroup cannot be into anything illegal, and you wonder why a big conglomerate would allow such a marginal and questionable thing to invade their deal.

Once Diane starts stalking Elaine, the action becomes violent, dreamlike, and confusing; perhaps it's all become a video game, but we're not told that. Diane flirts around with her lower-level associate, played by Chlöe Sevigny, but it's never clear whether they are rivals, enemies, or potential friends. The action becomes a matter of cars, corridors, beds, bars, seductions, and voyages in the rain. The surreal atmosphere is reminiscent of Cocteau or the Jean-Gabriel Albicocco of the mysterious 1961 Girl with the Golden Eyes. Visually it's beautiful, and the sound track is lush, but the plot, which was rather complicated at first, now becomes incomprehensible. A promo piece by the film's US distrubuters openly acknowledges this and excuses it thus: `Demonlover proves most compelling when it feels the least coherent or grounded in reality. Rather than keeping up with exactly which side of the game each major character appears to be playing on at a given moment in the story, viewers are almost better served just going along for the ride, letting the film take them where it will.' Yes, but the ride unfortunately goes nowhere.

Demonlover makes skillful use of extreme close-ups and intense sound. The wedding of image (by Denis Lenoir) and music (by Peter O'Rourke and Sonic Youth) creates a dreamlike, hypnotic effect. But what is happening? Somewhere half way through the plot virtually disintegrates before our eyes. The same promo sheet says it's no more complicated than James Bond movie, but this is unfair, because in Bond movies the good guys and bad guys are usually quite clearly defined, and here they distinctly are not. There is something mean spirited, too, in the way every nationality is abused: the Japanese are patsies, the Americans are boors, and the French are rude and exploitive.

The latter part of Demonlover, in short, gives the appearance of having been edited more for audiovisual effect than for narrative coherence. Despite the intriguing audiovisual experience the film offers, our interest in the plot and the characters with which the film begins is never satisfied.

Another source of dissatisfaction comes from pretensions to timeliness and significance. The filmmakers seem to think that buying and selling animé (with the B-picture tie-in of illicit S & M porn sites) is a significant indicator of media manipulation. But whether it's magazines or 3-D manga, pornography and the imaginative or financial involvement in it are nothing new. The way media is getting into the hands of a smaller and smaller number of mega companies is significant, but that's not Assayas' interest. Anyway, it's usually better not to try too consciously to be cutting edge, as Assayas' declarations show him to have been doing in Demonlover.

The actors are working hard, but their efforts are largely wasted. Connie Nielson, who has the bulk of screen time, is wonderful to look at. Her face is elegant and teases: is it a come-hither or a bugger-off look she is flashing to Charles Berling all the time? One never quite knows. Perhaps she herself wasn't told. Her ambiguity works for quite a while. One gets lost in that face. But it doesn't tell us anything, and since there is no sense of an ending, the later scenes fall flat.

For a movie that has a clear-cut and relevant treatment of cyber crime themes and really has some bearing on the danger of global takeovers and media manipulation -- but also provides the entertainment value of a clearcut thriller plot, take a look at Peter Howitt's 2001 Anti-Trust with Ryan Phillippe and Tim Robbins.

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9 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
One hour masterpiece (pity the movie last two hours), 3 August 2003
Author: abisio from Miami

Connie Nielsen is an industrial spy, infiltrated in big international corporation searching for secret information and trying to sabotage their last project DEMONLOVER.

DEMONLOVER is the name of a web site/3D porn anime/game. Well it is never too clear what exactly it is but you have a long glimpse at what it is inside (basically violent and highly sexual anime and 3D computer generated images).

However, been an industrial spy is not as easy as it may seem, particularly when three or four corporations are competing and very unscrupulous higher minds are manipulating the game and players. Almost everybody that has or had some relation with a major corporation, knows how greed, corruption and desire for power move everything inside, so nobody will deem unrealistic when people have to die to achieve the company business plan.

During the whole setup and presentation DEMONLOVER shines as the best real world spy movie seen lately, but sadly, the second half lose strength and the story get nowhere. Some scenes and storylines have not continuity (like a piece is cut or missing during editing) and the end is disappointing and unnecessary.

The movie is however worth watching. The acting is very good and for a French movie, most actors are well known in America like Connie Nielsen or Chloe Sevigny. The music score is excellent as most technical aspects and international locations (the movie was shot in France, USA, Japan and Mexico). The story is quite original and the suspense carries you until the end. It could easily pass as a decent thriller (albeit the superb it started as).

It is worth mentioning, that some things could endanger it commercial success. There are not good guys; just bad or worse and the main characters are women (men characters are accessories here). A few people could get upset for some porn (anime and human) showed during the film, but because that part of the story occurs in Japan, the gross scenes are digitally shadowed.

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6 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
I liked it, but not until the final scene (that is given away below)., 1 April 2004

Author: shoims from Buffalo, NY

Darn it, I liked this movie. At first, I had great difficulty following this film. However, the plot and cinematography were interesting enough to keep my attention and get me thinking. At first, Diane appears empowered by participating in some macho corporate espionage within the cutthroat world of technology. After the initial scene, we are shown that she really isn't in control. Diane's life unravels thread by thread. As the film progresses, we find out that she isn't even in charge of her own gopher: Diane is a puppet...a slave. What made Diane risk her job, her freedom? What makes the characters want to control and abuse people? A twerp who stole his daddy's credit card. Demonlover is a well-crafted comment on manipulation, commercialism, and (dare I say it?) the abuse of capitalism.

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17 out of 29 people found the following review useful:
Tres poor, I fruitlessly willed this movie to end, 27 December 2004

Author: jills_nipple from Sydney, Australia

If you love movies that build up your interest, then shatter it with awkward, misplaced and overlong dialogue-driven scenes, massive plot-holes and a "style" that consists of shooting the entire movie in grainy extreme close-up (another goddamn hand-held "shaky-cam" movie, a flavour of the month shooting style that has well and truly overstayed its welcome) then see this movie. I don't think it was worth the actor's time to learn to speak French. I hope they only learned it phoenetically.

The End (the movie isn't worth the Minimum 10 lines required for a review - I hated it passionately).

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10 out of 16 people found the following review useful:
The Most Original Film of 2003!, 21 September 2003
Author: crazyhellboy from Hell Lay, California

I have never seen an Olivier Assayas film before.This was just a visceral load of imagery that I didn't want to stop!

All of these images before you. Corporate power, double crossing, hentai anime, and interactive torture websites all come together to form something that might mean different things to different people. The performances are great though. Gina Gershon (Showgirls,Bound,Face/Off) looks better then ever only problem I wanted to see her more. Connie Nielsen in the lead role is awesome as the corporate mole/ice queen. I'm surprised that was the same actress in Gladiator and One-Hour Photo. And Chloe Sevigny is quiet but assertive at the same time.

If your tired of all the same exploding cars and sappy romantic comedies lately, come check this one out. You'll be pleasantly surprised

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