In the throes of the pandemic, director Neill Blomkamp made the low-budget techno-horror, Demonic. We take a look at a flawed yet intriguing film.
Following the lukewarm reception to his 2015 sci-fi film Chappie and the crushing disappointment surrounding the cancelled Alien 5, director Neill Blomkamp took six years to develop his next feature, Demonic, released in 2021. Not that he spent the intervening years licking his wounds.
Blomkamp segued for the latter part of the 2010s into making short films, many on a sizeable budget and scale, which allowed him to indulge various concepts, ideas and visual landscapes he hadn’t previously rendered on the big screen. For BMW, he made The Escape, a sequel of sorts to a series called The Hire that BMW produced in the early 2000s. It starred Clive Owen as ‘the Driver’, who takes the company’s cars for a spin as he conducts shadowy drops, transports individuals and chases antagonists. Owen returns in The Escape transporting Dakota Fanning, the subject of human cloning experiments, while pursued by Jon Bernthal’s mercenary.
The Escape is mostly a freeway chase between car and helicopter, akin to The Transporter series, but certainly points toward Blomkamp’s later interest in the Gran Turismo videogame series (he eventually made a film based on it in 2023). Moreover, his next two shorts – both of which clock in at almost half an hour – produced for experimental outfit Oats Studios, feel like responses to his abortive Alien project.
Rakka, with Sigourney Weaver in the cast, sees him construct a future where humanity has been enslaved by vicious alien reptiles who begin transforming human biology and taking control of their minds, while Firebase leans into Predator as a sinister creature attacks a group of American soldiers during the Vietnam War.
Equally, Zygote, a 20-plus minute animated film, draws on John Carpenter’s The Thing, as monsters hunt miners in an Arctic facility cut off from civilisation. Fanning provides a voice, as does Jose Pablo Cantillo from Elysium and Chappie, continuing Blomkamp’s desire to include actors he has worked with before. Smaller shorts provide fascinating snapshots into worlds and cinematic ideas. Adam: The Mirror, Gdańsk, Lima are all just a few minutes long, but in Blomkamp’s visual and stylistic wheelhouse. It feels like a period for him of incredible creativity and, almost certainly, a control often lacking in movies with budgets and executives in the background.
At the time, discussed with Den of Geek the rationale behind them:
“It doesn’t come from a place of wanting to go back to short films,” Blomkamp said in 2017. “It comes from a place of wanting to be able to do what I want to do and express what I want to express without having to have brain-numbing discussions about the political studio point of view of what they think the right move is. And obviously, you can’t spend tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars on large-scale feature films with an approach like this. Definitely not at the beginning. So the short film result is simply like a function of the financial pressure – it’s not that that’s the goal.”
His work with Oats is intriguing, given the freedom of expression he gets with these shorts, and how they bypass traditional release models – cinema, television etc – to exist on YouTube or Steam, free to watch. Blomkamp believes he may on the curve of a sea change in audience habits. And yet, during the onslaught of COVID-19, the filmmaker returned to feature-length storytelling with Demonic.
It stars Carly Pope, a little-known actor who appeared in numerous shorts Blomkamp had made in that cinematic interim. Demonic is by far his least star-studded piece of his work, eschewing the kind of well-known, even iconic actors dotted across his previous two films. He instead has a cast of unknowns playing out a story that, on the surface, seems to be a stylistic change for him. After years of dabbling in dystopian sci-fi, Blomkamp here puts one foot in the supernatural.
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Yet, the story of Carly (the lead character sharing the same first name as the actor who plays her) doesn’t hold to the tropes of traditional, Gothic or modern examples of religious horror. This is no re-tread of The Exorcist. There are priests, but they’re presented in a defiantly Blomkampian manner, as initially scientists inside a tech group who use cutting-edge virtual technology that allows Carly to enter the mind of her murderous, potentially demon-possessed mother, rendered in a Sims-like digital space she can interact with.
Blomkamp explained to RogerEbert.com his reasoning behind developing Demonic.
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“I wanted to see if I could make something with a lot of tension and brooding dread under the surface of the images,” Blomkamp said. “That was for sure the main driving goal. The technological elements … I think what you’re getting at is this idea of some sort of human heart that’s still tied to or explored through the use of technology which I guess is a theme that keeps coming up. A lot of that stuff is subconscious. It comes from a place of intuition. I think the more you intellectualise it, the further you get form the artwork if that makes sense. I’m not always sure why something feels right to me but in this case that took a backseat to the primary thing, where even looking at sunsets, I wanted there to feel this sense of dread.”
Demonic, compared to even Blomkamp’s short films, often looks glaringly low budget. It contains the nefarious corporate entity that always sits at the heart of the films he makes (with Gran Turismo perhaps the only exception, unless you look at the film from a product placement perspective…), but it lacks the macho male archetypes he often deploys, a specific use of heavy machinery, and for the first time relies on a female protagonist. It lends the film a deeper sense of emotion and intimacy, though something oddly feels missing.
It never truly manages to achieve that sense of dread Blomkamp was reaching for. He seems more interested in the confluence of research, technology and psychology on Carly. The reveal of her mother’s possession lacks impact, as the audience might feel one step ahead of Carly at almost every turn. It’s a unique approach to tackling a specific Christian archetype, yet Demonic demonstrates little in terms of spirituality, and more in the sense of technological evolution. Blomkamp continues his growing flirtation with transhumanism, with the biological human interfacing with digital spaces. In this case, said space also happens to become ‘infected’ by evil.
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Those are the areas where Demonic is most interesting: the moments where Carly is trapped in a space that is familiar-looking but beyond reality. Blomkamp’s approach to creating that digital psychological link between minds is deliberately low-fi and jarring, akin to looking at an early-2000s videogame at points, but it works. It places us in a voyeuristic space, in much the same way Gran Turismo explores the idea of taking playing games into a whole new physical realm. He’s a director interested in how technology transforms experiences that would never before have been possible. That feels like the core of Demonic for me.
The director discusses the process of how he created that digital arena:
“Technically we used a process called volumetric capture, which gives you this hyper-realistic feel,” he told RogerEbert.com. “Not motion capture. It feels like you’re looking at a real human but you know it’s not the correct representation of them, it’s filtered through something. That process was pretty difficult to do. We shot it in this four-meter cylinder, a four-meter prison cell basically, with 260 4K cameras and additional cameras brought in closer. For the emotional scenes between Carly and her mom, they were in the most synthetic, un-actor friendly place you could imagine.”
Perhaps that’s why the emotional component never entirely comes alive in Demonic. Stronger actors might have found those elements in the script. The result is a film that, while in step with Blomkamp’s interests, feels decidedly amateurish compared to what he’s capable of and what came before. It says nothing new about relationships or possession, but it deserves a look for the link it provides between the spirit and the digital world – however unlikely that might manifest in reality.
Thankfully, Gran Turismo sees a return for Neill Blomkamp to the sturdier, higher budget filmmaking which will, hopefully, see his return to the kind of world-building and visual style he’s proven himself capable of. In March this year, it was announced that he is indeed moving back to the blockbuster end of filmmaking with a new take on Robert Heinlein’s novel, Starship Troopers. About technically-augmented soldiers fighting giant insects on a distant planet, it’s again of a piece, thematically, with his earlier work in the sci-fi genre.
Even if Blomkamp might always be haunted by never getting the chance to make his dream Alien movie, he’ll always to be a director with one eye over the next hill, pondering humanity’s relationship with technology.
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