Critics reviews

Throughout, the movie carries you along with a queasy momentum and a corybantic, flitting multitasker’s eye for offhand detail... Assayas assiduously follows the moving paper, for all of these transactions are the myriad little notes that together form the concerto of twenty-first-century life. And that concerto does have a sordid magnificence.

For a movie that’s such an artifact of its time, [Demonlover] doesn’t feel dated so much as accurate, plausible, predicting the burgeoning anxieties of the time in which it takes place. Its squeamish ending is no less terrifying almost twenty years later.

Demonlover blends elements of the thriller, heist film, and porn with revolutionary verve, revealing the incredibly close proximity of high art and lowbrow kinks. But what makes this hallucinatory and nightmarish vision of early-online subterfuge so singular is how it fixates on analog textures within a crumbling post-modern world slowly being consumed by all things digital. Every grainy frame exudes the dying gasp of celluloid.

An intricately plotted, cool and nasty cyber-thriller that, twisting itself into a Möbius strip, means to expose cutthroat industrial intrigue in the video game industry.

Up to about halfway, [Demonlover] is an efficient thriller acted with conviction by the three female leads. But then the script goes a twist too far and the final impression is of a silly, oddly disagreeable movie.

A genre film that deconstructs itself before our eyes can easily leave the audience feeling cheated or dissatisfied, and Demonlover hits this problem long before the final scene. But Assayas is a remarkable stylist and, as a pure aesthetic object, Demonlover is quite a feast.

As chilly and slow-moving as a glacier, but rather less translucent... [Demonlover] is fun for a while, but gets steadily more opaque, elliptical and annoying. This is probably Assayas's way of telling us how complex, abstract, inhumane and morally confused our inhospitable electronic global village has become.

This elegant cyberthriller captures a certain state of the contemporary world with the acuity, sensitivity, and precision of a seismograph registering the planet’s tectonic shifts... At once illness and antidote, wound and knife, chilling and fascinating-in short, demonic and loving-demonlover is a beautiful and disturbing contemporary filmic object

It's gripping and provocative, making effective use of actor Charles Berling and the music of Sonic Youth, though I wish it were a little less indebted to David Cronenberg's Videodrome. 

It's an exasperating, irresistible, must-see mess of a movie about life in the modern world and so very good that even when its story finally crashes and burns the filmmaking remains unscathed.

"Demonlover" is so in love with its visuals and cockeyed plot that it forgets to think about the implications.

A shiny, wireless perpetual-motion machine, forever in flux as if to stave off obsolescence, Olivier Assayas’s demonlover makes other present-day movies look like moldering period pieces.