Demonlover begins as VolfGroup, a French multi-national is making a bid to purchase TokyoAnime, a company that creates Hentai, animated Japanese porn. Early on we see Diane, played by the stunning Connie Nielsen, inject Haldol into a coworker’s bottled water. We do not know what she is playing at until we see the woman kidnapped by two thugs in the next scene. Immediately we are swept into a wild world of corporate espionage and lighting-paced global consumer culture. It turns out that the reason Volf Corporation is buying TokyoAnime is because they are developing a 3D Hentai product that Demonlover and MangaTronics, two competing online porn services, are fighting each other to the death for. The film escalates deeper and deeper into the complex and sordid culture of specialized pornography and organized crime. Diane, it turns out is secretly working for MangaTronics and Karen, the woman she poisons at the outset of the film, turns out to be an agent of Demonlover. Elise, Karen’s personal assistant played by Chloe Sevigny, is also working for Demonlover to a much greater degree. When Diane learns about the existence of Hellfire Club, an online torture service run by Demonlover, she is kidnapped by Elise in order for them to control her.

Olivier Assayas has created an amazing film that evokes the best of David Lynch, William Gibson, and David Cronenberg. He constructs a mirror-world projection that seems to exist 15 minutes ahead of our own world. Here survival is dictated by the ability to be multi-lingual, absurdly chic, fluent in global economics, and fully enmeshed in the bleeding edge of cultural and technological modes of production. And yet the characters seem soul-less, motivated by profit and thoroughly detached from the bizarre situations they are involved in. Diane comes off not unlike someone playing a videogame as she eventually commits murders and performs sexually against her will. Much of the film itself seems to be a commentary on the nature of gaming, network interfaces and interactive devices. It's also a cautionary tale of out of control capitalism. It subtly slides from a conventional techno thriller to an all out criticism of our contemporary society of the spectacle.

Demonlover also astounds technically. Director of Photography Denis Lenoir employs a variety of cameras and film stocks to create a montage that dreamily interprets the dizzy world we inhabit. The colors seem to be lit from within, like an led monitor, which lends an otherworldly feel to the film. The editing choices also work very well. Some of the jump cuts are so dramatic that they evoke jumping from one website to another in the middle of a particularly frenetic web surfing experience. All of this is supported by an amazing score supplied by none other than Jim O'Rourke and Sonic Youth. Their ambient, atonal work drenches the scenery of the film with mutant soundscapes that perfectly accompany the internal and external action of the film.

Overall I found Demonlover to be a comprehensively stimulating film that explores deep problems in our commodity-based culture. It’s a paranoid work that is thoroughly enmeshed in our post 9/11 world where heightened fear encourages us to annihilate any form of potential competition before it can do the same to us in order to sustain our relentless desire for power and capital.