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Neill Blomkamp’s sci-fi/horror movie Demonic never resolves its biggest mystery: how the technology used to perform exorcisms actually works.
WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Neill Blomkamp’s Demonic, out now via IFC Midnight.
While Neill Blomkamp’s Demonic sometimes breaks new ground in the way it melds sci-fi with supernatural horror, as a whole the movie is a mess. It’s also full of confusing plot points, like when Vatican agents use Carly as bait to lure a demon out from within her mom, Angela, without really clarifying how they go about banishing dark entities that have taken hold of people. Similarly, Demonic neglects to resolve its biggest mystery: How the film’s exorcism tech works.
Demonic center around Therapol, a bio-med company in Los Angeles that houses comatose patients like Angela. The company’s agents, including Michael and Daniel, use cutting-edge tech to map the minds of people suspected of being demonically possessed and then have their loved ones wear headsets to enter this simulation of these patients’ memories.
The main objective of this process is to allow the exorcists to figure out where the possession or, as they call it, infection occurred. Once they determine this, they can take the victim there and perform the exorcism, as this is where the gateway exists to send the malevolent force back to where it came from.
However, we never learn exactly how this process works, which diminishes the emotional resonance of Demonic‘s final act. Michael and Daniel take Angela to her ground zero after somehow determining it’s a sanitarium built on haunted grounds. By the time Carly arrives, though, the entity has jumped into Michael, killing everyone else. A dying Daniel then tells her to trace the cables and use the machine to try to save her mom, which offers little to no insight into what they were doing in the first place.
If a possessed person is at the spot where they became possessed, then it stands to reason a regular exorcism should pull the demon out and spit it back to hell. But Demonic is about pioneering tech, so one would assume we would learn about the tech itself. Instead, it’s unclear if Michael hooked himself up to Angela’s mind and drew the creature out through the simulation of her memories. If that’s the case, then it means the demonic entity was close to the person’s mental surface.
Alternatively, it could be the priests just needed a way to distinguish normal brain activity from those connected to the paranormal. They would be able to do this thanks to the mindscape, which would reveal whether progress was being made or if they were in danger of killing the human host as they said their prayers in the real world.
Frustratingly, all Carly does is plug in the mindscape and bid goodbye to her mom, who shows her the dream home she wanted them to have, had she never fallen prey to the devil. It’s a sentimental moment but doesn’t explain anything about the exorcism tech. Rather, Carly just uses a holy dagger given to her by Daniel to kill Michael and burn the spirit out, leaving us to wonder why Demonic places so much emphasis on technology that’s rendered inconsequential by the end of the film.
Demonic is out now via IFC Midnight.
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