DEMONLOVER

“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning DEMONLOVER, a postmodern neo-noir thriller and media critique in which nothing—not even the film itself—is what it appears to be.

Nielsen plays Diane de Monx, a Volf Corporation executive turned spy for rival Mangatronics in the companies’ battle over the lucrative market of online hentai. But Diane may not be the only player at Volf with a hidden agenda: both romantic interest Hervé (Charles Berling) and office enemy Elise (Chloë Sevigny) seem to know her secret and can easily use it against her for their own purposes. As the stakes grow higher and Diane ventures into deadlier territory, Assayas explores the connections between multinational businesses and extreme underground media as well as the many ways twenty-first-century reality increasingly resembles violent, disorienting fiction.

“At once illness and antidote, wound and knife, chilling and fascinating—in short, demonic and loving—DEMONLOVER is a beautiful and disturbing contemporary filmic object, concentrating within itself all of Assayas's obsessions.” - Serge Kaganski

“Then-present-tense cyberpunk, DEMONLOVER is forever frozen upon the cusp of a lost futurism already lapsing into a decadent kitsch. The flows and tentacles of capital, all periphery and no center, shells within shells, without flags or loyalties. A Venn Diagram of exploitation with too many circles, relationships impossible to plot. 9/11 rendered this frictionless world of jet lag and instantaneous document transfer as unreachable as the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War One. The brief glimpse of Bush II on hotel tv is shocking enough, but he is talking about energy companies, not yet a 'war-time president', but the spectre of the torture dungeon lurks here too: before it was policy, it was just business.” - Nathaxnne Walker