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Parents' Guide to

Demonic

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 15+

Dull monster-possession movie has gore, language.

Movie R 2021 104 minutes
Demonic Poster Image

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Kids say (2 ):

All the elements for a fun movie are present in Neill Blomkamp's low-budget horror movie, but somehow it just never gets moving; there's no emotional connection, no scares, and no suspense. The selling point of Demonic is its use of volumetric capture technology, which essentially makes things look like a glitchy video game. The movie's sequences using that technique could have been interesting, if for no other reason than their novelty, but Blomkamp's unwise use of handheld/shaky camera while in the digital universe calls attention to itself and spoils the effect.

Blomkamp, of course, made a splashy debut with the overrated District 9, which combined heavy messages with sci-fi and gory battles. His subsequent movies, Elysium and Chappie, were a little more flatly transparent in their intentions, and now Demonic reveals a filmmaker who's ultimately less interested in stories or humans than he is in sermons and technology. After watching Carly for 104 minutes, we still have no idea who she really is, other than a woman who hates her mother and abandons her friends for being a little too odd. Not even the un-scary monster has a shred of personality in this highly skippable dud.

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