Demonlover

Diane de Monx is an executive trying to negotiate a deal to acquire the rights to the productions of a Japanese anime studio, which will soon include three-dimensional hentai, for the French-based Volf Corporation. To facilitate the acquisition, she eliminates her superior, Karen, and assumes control of her portfolio, her business partner Hervé, and her assistant Elise. Elise, however, despises Diane and works to frustrate her negotiations at every opportunity. Diane and Hervé travel to Tokyo to close the deal, and they enjoy a sexual flirtation.

Having acquired the rights, the Volf Corporation attempts to enter into a deal for distribution with an American Internet company called Demonlover, represented by Elaine Si Gibril. Diane, however, has actually been a spy all along for Demonlover's main competition, Mangatronics, meeting with a mysterious handler on occasion to pass along information on the Demonlover deal. Meanwhile, Diane discovers that Elaine's company is a front for a website called the Hellfire Club, an interactive torture site on the dark web that broadcasts extreme sadomasochism in real-time. When confronted with these charges, Demonlover praises Hellfire Club but claims no ties to it whatsoever.

In order to seal the deal for Mangatronics, Diane is sent by her handler to steal data from the computer in Elaine's hotel room. Before Diane can download the information, Elaine enters the hotel room and notices Diane's presence. A violent struggle ensues, and Diane slashes Elaine's throat with a piece of broken glass before suffocating her with a pillow in a supply closet outside the room. Elaine briefly regains consciousness and bludgeons Diane, before dying due to blood loss. When Diane awakens, she is in Elaine's hotel room, and everything is completely cleaned up. There is no evidence of a murder, burglary, or struggle.

Diane subsequently meets with Elise, whom she drives home during a rainstorm. In conversation, Elise implies that Diane should be scared for her life before demanding to be dropped off on the side of the street. Returning to the Volf offices alone, Diane manages to log onto the Hellfire Club website, which displays disturbing footage and images of women being sexually tortured. Karen arrives at the office, and also gives Diane an ominous warning, confirming that Demonlover does indeed own and operate the Hellfire Club website. Karen leaves behind a camcorder tape for Diane to view, which shows Elise and several men cleaning up the crime scene from Elaine's murder, as well as carrying an unconscious Diane back to her room. Diane gleans that Elise is in fact a spy for Demonlover, working under Hervé, who is also a covert associate.

Elise uses Diane's murder of Elaine as blackmail against her, forcing Diane to acquiesce and become part of the Hellfire Club. She escorts Diane to a mansion in the country, where she drugs her. Through flashbacks, it is revealed that Diane also murdered Hervé while having sex. Some time later, Diane and Elise are flown by helicopter to a desert locale, where Diane again loses consciousness. When she awakens, she finds herself in a dungeonlike room, on a mattress, dressed in a vinyl suit and with a wig. Beside the mattress there are pictures of Diana Rigg as Mrs. Peel in The Avengers. Diane attempts to escape, and is almost successful. However, upon driving her getaway car she is involved in a car accident. The escape fails.

Some time later, in the United States, a teenage boy logs onto the Hellfire Club with his father's credit card. He then fills out a detailed fantasy of what he would like done to the woman on the screen, who turns out to be Diane, bound and wearing a bondage suit. The boy allows his fantasy to play in the background as he completes his science homework, while Diane stares helplessly at the camera from her chamber.

One of the themes of the film is the desensitization to violent or disturbing imagery, both real and simulated, in the modern viewer. Writer Rosanna Maule describes the film as one preoccupied with the over-saturation of digital media culture and globalization, and the roles they play in the "formation of the economic, ideological, and social."[4] Upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Demonlover was noted for the disintegrated nature of its final act, which has been described by critic Jonathan Romney as "fall[ing] into an apparent lapse of incoherence."[5] Romney characterizes the film as one made in "the catastrophic mode," exploring a post-capitalist 'société de spectacle' (lit. "society of spectacle"), "grown out of a generalised contamination and formatting of reality that leaves no apparent means of escape."[6] Critic Thierry Jousse similarly wrote that this quality of the film exhibits "the vertigo of sameness...  a no man's land of time changes, of diffused projections, of mental images, of tricky perspectives, of disconnected spaces of ghostly gaps."[7]

Demonlover premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival.[15] It was subsequently released theatrically in France on 6 November 2002, and in the United States on 19 September 2003 by Palm Pictures, premiering in Los Angeles in its original unrated cut.[1] It opened in Boston the following week, 26 September 2003.[16] The film grossed $462,976 internationally.[17]

• Beugnet, Martine (2007). Cinema and Sensation: French Film and the Art of Transgression. Carbondale, Illinois: SIU Press. ISBN 978-0-809-32856-7.
• Maule, Rosanna (2008). Beyond Auteurism: New Directions in Authorial Film Practices in France, Italy and Spain Since the 1980s. Chicago, Illinois: Intellect Books. ISBN 978-1-841-50204-5.

• Official website
• Demonlover at IMDb
• Demonlover at Rotten Tomatoes
• Demonlover at Discogs (list of releases)