Demonlover

a shallow, pointless work of gibberish on the matrix of art, life and reality which fails to achieve any of its goals (Palm Pictures)

Starts off really quite interesting, but goes badly off the rails. In the end, the viewer inevitably resents having been invited into an intriguing tale traversing some thought-provoking territory, only to be confronted with a series of scenes that are not only confusing and absurd, but, worse, nearly wholly uninteresting. The final "payoff" is simply not worth the price of enduring the second half.

i did once think the homogenous, disoriented digital aesthetic and impenetrable, tentacle-like structure served as the definitive shorthand for our dehumanisation at the hands of neolib globalisation, but it's rly started to show its age, and besides, assayas is such a sneering scold that whenever he goes sleek and modern it ultimately plays like a lame dad's painfully transparent masquerade despite his actresses' heroic efforts. if you don't believe me, wait 'til you see this film's epilogue.

Shows promise, but it doesn't really bank on any of it. The entanglement of corporate espionage with the "Dark Web" is fascinating in the beginning but soon becomes murky beyond recognition by the end. Working out the motives of the major players is a headache. Asking questions like "What is the profit motive here?" or "Why are these corporate elites involved with this nonsense?" is hopeless. The ending seems to be a "Hah, karma!" moment, but how it got to that point, I'm not really sure.

"Assayas is a great lover of women, so its no surprise that the ladies of demonlover are every bit as vulnerable, feral and dangerous as Irma Vep." - Ed Gonzalez

strange, cold and pretty damn good *rewatch (previous score was 75): holy fuck. aesthetically perfect and creepily prescient. it's still largely forgotten/written-off 17 years after its release, but this is one of the very best movies of the 2000s and hopefully someday it will get the reevaluation it deserves

Some intriguing, and often downright perplexing, ideas are presented half coherently. I didn't really expect to find myself watching hentai when I threw this on.

i love this genre but this wasn't it for me. a shitter version of videodrome

I think this is an intriguing film that doesn't completely succeed, mostly because it's narrative really fragments to near incomprehensibility in the last act. The film seems extremely early 2000s, but it's portrait of a world consumed by increasingly sensationalized media feels prophetic, as does it's portrayal of corporate infighting and maneuvering descending into murder and sexualized violence. However, the decision to place a lot of crucial plot offscreen doesn't really work all that well

Starts off as a very intriguing techno-thriller about the high stakes world of international hentai distribution rights, but completely goes off the rails in the second half. Still averages out to a recommendation.

Absolutely weird film about corporate hentai espionage that decends into the dark world of online pornography. Has some of the most absurd music drops I have ever seen. If I had understood anything in the second half, I would have rated it higher.

Fascinating, fucked-up, and scarily prescient. The depiction of a complete amorality is equally funny and horrible, and the picture it paints of voyeurism and exploitation in the internet age has become scarily real. The last quarter has some superfluous stuff but mostly I dug it.

This starts of very promising as a well directed corporate spionage thriller. But the second half can be best described as an interesting mess. A mess cause the story derails and the characters motives less understandable. Still interesting cause of the theme about desensitization by extreme violence and porn and corporate selfish greed. One could argue that the emptiness of characters fits the theme of dehumanization. One could also argue that it makes the second half a rather boring watch,

i am way too sensitive for this

Demonlover has been associated with the films of the New French Extremity, but I don't see how. It's not particularly explicit, nor extremely violent, and it doesn't drag you down any dark emotional holes. It is entertaining though, a corporate thriller maybe? There are some explicit computer generated scenes, from various games, but the technology is so outdated that they look more laughable than shocking. It does get a little strange toward the end, though...

The plotline for this is intriguing and sounded rather ahead of its time, which it is. Starts off appropriately mundane in a business-like manner, then slowly drawed me in with its bizarro and hostile relations between these business-people as it seems their line of business is guaranteed to cause such grueling misbehaviour. Subtlety is thrown out the window towards the end, and the conclusion doesn't entirely ring true, but there's dark fascination in the film's middle.

Every time I watch one of Olivier Assayas' movies, I have to wonder why I don't spend all of my time watching Olivier Assayas' movies. This one opens with a Neu! song, is a cryptic sort-of-technothriller set in the porn industry, and makes for a pretty compelling treatise on the horrors of culture-wide desensitization. It's hard to think of a more perfect symbol of the Internet Age than a website that streams videos of a woman dressed like Lara Croft being tortured.

Movie was interesting fight for power between several leading ladies. There is a lot of erotic tension; we are dealing with virtual manga porn sites and fight for their rights. But the story shatters the whole thing and because of incoherent twists in the story, we end up with highly unpleasant mixed up feeling what was all about. The story is still there, but who the hell was Connie Nielsen's character. Really.