New media has relentlessly dug its cyber-claws into the heart of cinema for over 20 years now, constantly raising the bar in an industry of simulacra manipulation that seems to be entirely without limits.  For many, Spielberg’s dinos and Jackson’s Gollum are revelatory manifestations of the imagination made possible by the benevolent hand of new media’s godliest offspring, CGI.  For others, however, those creations of the digi-divine consistently raise frightening questions about the ever-warping nature of human perception.  Peruse the shelves at your local bookstore and you’ll find Jean Baudrillard flanked by a host of media theorists eager to remind us that 1) the future is pixelated, and 2) we won’t be able to tell.  According to Olivier Assayas, however, the future is now and the blurring has begun.

It is while drugging the beverage of her work-rival Karen (Dominique Reymond) in the bathroom of an airplane not five minutes into the film that Connie Nielsen’s Diane and Assayas’s demonlover seem most lucid.  She has an objective, we have a familiar scene of sabotage, Karen drinks, and everyone waits to see what happens.  It’s simple, and—though we know little of their relationship—as clear-cut as the film will ever be. Spilling into the terminal, the designer-dud business troupe discuss the panoply of drugs available to remedy their flight-induced insomnia as if there has never been another option.  Karen puts in her two cents, begins to feel unwell, exits to her jet-black Audi and is quietly swept into the trunk by two men waiting in the wings.  No more Karen, new business card for Diane.

It’s in these first moments that Assayas delineates demonlover’s all-too-familiar environment: a self-medicated world in which the ubiquity of prescription drugs is outmatched only by the number of cover stories glamorizing their use; a place where happy, sad, and the middle states of consciousness are a mere pill-pop away, where psychological perception of emotion, the self, of the quotation-bound “real” is constantly being muddled at our own hands because, apparently, we just won’t have it any other way.  This intrinsic urge to blur borders, to deceive and distort, not only becomes demonlover’s ideological leitmotif, but a disorienting structural device for narrative and editing practices that leave the audience as dubiously ill-informed as the film’s floundering heroine.

A cut from candy-colored manga characters to their similarly kaleidoscopic real-life lip-synching club sisters, serves as a frightening segue to the heart of an issue subtly elicited in the preceding shot-reverse shot between ice-cold Diane and her vampy computer generated doppelgänger: Is the organic moving towards artificiality, or vice versa, and should we be more scared of a rise of the machines, or the mechanization of ourselves?  Assayas’s take—contrary to sci-fi history—seems more interested in the latter, the dehumanization of a race increasingly unconcerned with the preservation of its inherent human capacities.  It sounds silly at first, almost premature.  But if demonlover is the future of cinema, it’s a masterwork of today, reminding us that we’ve just merely merged onto the new media highway, and that it ramifies far beyond the instant message.  Demonlover’s live sex is as stunted as the deteriorating verbal communication; watching all modes of intercourse give way to their simulated brethren is not so frightening in reality as it is the hands of a visionary like Assayas.  A cross-continental, multilingual, demi-digital work of limina with roots only in its harsh critique of the world within which its characters “exist,” demonlover ingeniously suggests why email is a horrific substitute for the human contact we all take for granted, free of soothing technology’s protective sugarcoating, “Well, it makes life easier...”

A short coda returns the film to sobriety in another familiar environment: suburban America.  An adolescent boy swipes his father’s credit card to log into the interactive S&M website Hellfire Club.  Once an international corporate power player dealing 1’s and 0’s, Diane is now nothing more than a choose-your-own-torture fantasy girl at the mercy of a middle schooler.  But with all the censorable material demonlover unabashedly delights in splashing onscreen, the most chilling images Assayas offers are in a final camera move past the boy to his computer monitor.  Ending his dark treatise on the world not with, but of new media, he glides past the student and his biology homework to rest on digital-Diane. For an eternal moment, she is staring quite blankly, at us.