Review of Demōn (2016) by Postnihilist — 04 Sep 2017

This was a very disappointing movie. There was some very good acting, but this film lacked a coherent narrative. Numerous times characters behaved completely irrationally, frequently by totally failing to react. Presumably cutting from a scene in the middle of the night to a scene in morning sunshine and then back to a scene at night is metaphorical for something, or symbolic of something. All it achieved for me is make me very irritated because not one of the characters involved seemed put out by this wedding lasting, apparently, three days, with no sleep. Again, maybe that's symbolic, but it just irritated me. I don't want to watch a movie where the narrative is second priority to the meta-narrative. A meta-narrative should complement the narrative, and each should be able to stand on its own merits. This is a pretentious flop.

A film should not have so very many scenes where a character stands in front of a stationary camera and gets to portray - what? A drunken bridesmaid singing badly in a state of undress? What does that add to the plot, and since we don't even know her name or her relationship to anything whatsoever, what does it add to anything? There are several such scenes, they all go on too long and cause the performance of the actor to be so transparently performative that any immersion in the story is ripped away. A lot of this movie went over my head. So I don't like it. But you know what makes a really terrific film; it works on every level. This movie does not work on the most basic levels of story-telling. As such, it strikes me as damning of the film-critics of America that they enjoyed this self-indulgent dreck so much. There was a historical theological debate over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. That's not apocryphal. But no matter how sophisticated the reasoning, or elegant the logic and arguments were, you'd really have to have your head way up your ass to call that a worthwhile contribution to the canon of Western philosophy.