It's cautiously compiled, competent work-for-hire, but the wild swings and grand designs of this film-maker's earlier output are sorely missed.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 26, 2021

Stealing a trick from Tarsem Singh's The Cell (2000). Blomkamp's film uses zones constructed from the detritus of the unconscious as a way of giving cinematic form - sight and sound - to otherwise internal struggles and states.

| Aug 25, 2021

Demonic feels like a film made by someone who's scared of his own ideas and his own limitations.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 20, 2021

The deeper that Blomkamp digs into his pixel-thin premise, the more glaring it becomes that Demonic lacks the genre fundamentals required to support any sort of broader mythology.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 20, 2021

With a minuscule 10-person cast, and a smattering of well-placed VFX work, Demonic feels like someone crowbarred a V8 into a VW Beetle and handed the keys to a champion racer.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 19, 2021

Clunks and gasps along, chugging off the fumes of better movies.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 19, 2021

Unfortunately, Demonic often lacks the substance and energy needed to back up its narrative originality and hybrid genre form.

| Aug 19, 2021

It's just a drag.

| Aug 19, 2021

Neill Blomkamp's latest does propose a number of very promising ideas, but all of them land with a thud.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 18, 2021

At one point, a character in a coma is referred to as having Locked-In Syndrome, which means that she's still aware of her surroundings but is totally unable to move. By the end of "Demonic," you'll know just how she feels.

| Aug 18, 2021

This is a movie with giant bird demons and super-powered spears and Vatican black-ops agents who have enough money to build VR technology but who don't know how to Google the location of a house. There's no excuse for any of that to be humdrum.

| Aug 17, 2021

Up to the disappointingly inert finale, we can anticipate each move before the film makes it.

| Original Score: C- | Aug 17, 2021

In the end, Demonic is all simulation, no real scares.

| Aug 16, 2021

Blomkamp uses sci-fi and tech to give an inside view of the possessed, but the high concept fails to inject new life, or scares, into a standard possession tale.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Aug 16, 2021

Like District 9, the film is a genre outing with big ideas that's more committed to the power of arsenals and pyrotechnics.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 16, 2021