Making a mess of a genre mashup
Rated R. 104 minutes. On Apple TV, Google Play or other platforms.
Flat acting, risible dialogue, a witless story — sometimes when a movie hits this trifecta so completely, it engenders a feeling of disreputable pleasure. It’s bad, and you know it, and maybe the filmmakers know it, too. How could they not? Yet somehow all the suboptimal (inept, incoherent) elements mysteriously cohere into a work that finds its own perverse groove.
“Demonic” is not such a singular amusement. It’s just a drag.
It’s also baffling given that its writer-director, Neill Blomkamp, has a handful of solid movies on his résumé. Whatever you thought of the political reach of his feature debut “District 9” or blowouts like “Chappie” and “Elysium,” he had a handle, however wobbly, on the material. All three are dystopian science fiction thrillers, a category that seems to attract him mostly for its aesthetics of ruin.
Like a lot of filmmakers, he clearly likes blowing things up. But he gave the destruction scale and some humor, and even when he couldn’t harmonize the camera and the actors, he generally held your attention. The movies were good enough that you didn’t regret your life choices after watching them.
“Demonic” suckers you in with some auspicious flickers, including the movie’s atmosphere of clammy unease.
The brooding British Columbia landscape, with its undulating dark waters and encircling gloomy mountains, do a lot to set the unsettled mood. The depopulated area, underlighting and slow windup plant a question mark or two in your head, as do the off-key performances, which border on the affectless. Partly because of the foreboding and the Canadian accents, I briefly and over-hopefully flashed on the early films of David Cronenberg — a mistake. There are a few early horrorscare jolts, but for a while Blomkamp focuses on setting the narrative table.
Strategic or not, this delay works for the movie, because the more the story develops, the worse it gets. A modestly scaled hodgepodge of clichés, the movie awkwardly mixes a few science fiction touches with some horror film basics (a demon, a haunted institution) and action flick elements (guys with guns, ammo and tats) for a tale of an unhappy woman (Carly Pope), her unfortunate mother (Nathalie Boltt) and some unpersuasively loyal friends (Chris William Martin and Kandyse Mcclure).
None of these people, as characters or as performers, fit together — but, really, nothing does.
Bad things happen with feeble scares, perfunctory shrieks, shoddy storytelling and some fussy special effects that aren’t as visually engaging as Blomkamp seems to hope.