When Demonic came out, I was very excited for it. I’m a fan of Blomkamp’s District 9 and his Oats Studios shorts. The trailer led me to believe that the film was going to be a mix of sci-fi and horror. That’s a cocktail that I appreciate quite a bit! It got some pretty poor reviews when it came out though. That’s not necessarily a dealbreaker for me but I did drag my feet on going to see it. I dragged them for so long that it left theaters before I got around to it. No problem! It will surely be on streaming services fairly soon. And it was. But I pay for certain services and those services apparently didn’t want to pay for a streaming license for the film. So I waited until today when I found it on Tubi to watch it, making it entry 4 of 31 for October 2025. Tubi really is a treasure trove! Anyway… Let’s get into it, shall we?
Carly is estranged from her arsonist/felon mother who has been locked up for years. Her estranged (but not an arsonist/felon) childhood friend, Martin, reaches out asking to meet up. He found her mom in a medical facility when he was there as a treatment trial subject (or something). She is in a coma and didn’t look good. Carly goes to the facility and signs up for the trial. The program is operated by a med-tech company called Therapol. The treatment is a virtual reality therapy for people with locked-in syndrome like Carly’s mother. They allow Carly to connect to the equipment and enter her mother’s virtual world. She unloads on mom, telling her that she is a shitty parent and that she hates her. Mom says she understands but she needs to leave the virtual world now and never come back. Turns out mom is possessed by a demon and Therapol is a front for a Catholic organization that polices such things. Hijinks ensue. Well, not “hijinks” really. More like death and destruction.
I really wanted to like this movie. I was rooting for Neill! Unfortunately, it’s kind of a mess. The virtual world is PS2 graphics level and that is just not really accurate for 2021. I can accept that maybe it was a stylistic choice, but that doesn’t explain the wonky audio. The dialogue echoes in the virtual world for some reason. Why? Did they leave a reverb pedal plugged into the unit? And then there is the Krueger-esque ability of the demon to harm people who are in the virtual world. How the fuck does that work? Carly isn’t the one possessed. She is just in Second Life where mom is. And the thing didn’t even touch her. But it doesn’t stop there. Apparently, the reason that Carly and her friend Sam cut Martin out of their lives is because he was haunted by the demon and they thought he was crazy. So it’s a ghost too? It also has the ability to puppet Sam out of her distant home without her remembering how she got to the old burned down nursing home where mom was first possessed and started the fire. But we are told that the demon is trapped in the comatose woman. How is it “trapped” if it can do all of these things? The story culminates with an IRL showdown with the beast (that shouldn’t be a spoiler if you’ve ever seen a movie before) where the elite Catholic commandos have all been wiped out and their ammo is somehow all “spent” so our heroes can’t use their guns. Convenient. It’s all just such a disappointment. The story is a mess that fails to use Blomkamp’s Oats Studio’s more (much more) creative creature designs that blew audiences away in 2021 – the same year that this clunker was released.
The Final Cut: Demonic is a disappointing waste of an interesting concept. Blomkamp does not deliver the creativity or focused storytelling that he proved capable of with District 9 and the Oats Studios shorts.
No Real Danger 