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Demonlover

Demonlover

2002
Drama, Suspense/Thriller
2h 9m
A thought-provoking, radical essay on the matrix of art, life and virtual reality which deliberately toys with narrative conventions. (Palm Pictures)
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Demonlover

2002
Drama, Suspense/Thriller
2h 9m
Your probable score
Avg Percentile 47.48% from 319 total ratings

Ratings & Reviews

(319)
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Rated 20 Jun 2009
25
7th
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.
Rated 04 May 2019
12
12th
a shallow, pointless work of gibberish on the matrix of art, life and reality which fails to achieve any of its goals (Palm Pictures)
Rated 13 May 2009
100
99th
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
Rated 30 Nov 2010
25
61st
"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
Rated 07 Nov 2015
5
42nd
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.
Rated 31 Dec 2008
56
45th
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.
Rated 17 May 2016
85
59th
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.
Rated 22 Mar 2017
73
46th
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.
Rated 11 Apr 2017
60
38th
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...
Rated 18 Sep 2019
50
27th
i am way too sensitive for this
Rated 01 Dec 2019
70
43rd
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,
Rated 14 Sep 2021
2
17th
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.
Rated 01 Apr 2023
80
54th
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.
Rated 18 Apr 2023
78
80th
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.
Rated 05 Oct 2023
75
49th
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.
Rated 11 Nov 2023
70
42nd
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
Rated 13 Jan 2024
65
25th
i love this genre but this wasn't it for me. a shitter version of videodrome
Rated 19 Feb 2024
45
23rd
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.

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