'Demonlover' Restoration Trailer: Oliver Assayas' Paranoid Post-Modern Thriller Returns In A Unrated Director's Cut In February

Oliver Assayas‘ 2002 thriller, “Demonlover” is dense, hypnotic, and out there, and out there. Starring Connie Nielson, Gina Gershon, Chloë Sevigny, and Charles Berling, the byzantine plot centers on a French corporation that goes head-to-head with an American web media company for the rights to a 3D manga pornography studio, resulting in a power struggle that culminates in bloody violence and espionage. But the film, while a thriller, is not a typical espionage film, much more surreal, and nightmarish.

Granted, it’s been a while since I watched, but what I can mostly remember is an unhinged score by art punkers Sonic Youth and a film that felt legitimately radical and outré at the time. Film Comment said about the film recently, “‘Demonlover” twists the conventions of the espionage thriller into a perceptive indictment of Internet culture and the entrepreneurs who exploit it.”

Assayas’ film, which premiered at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival, is getting the re-release treatment in a new director’s cut. Here’s the synopsis:

“No one sees anything. Ever. They watch, but they don’t understand.” So observes Connie Nielsen in Olivier Assayas’s hallucinatory, globe-spanning Demonlover, a postmodern neo-noir thriller and media critique in which nothing-not even the film itself-is what it appears to be. Nielsen plays Diane de Monx; a Volf Corporation executive turned spy for rival Mangatronics in the companies’ battle over the lucrative market of Internet adult animation. But Diane may not be the only player at Volf with a hidden agenda: both romantic interest Hervé (Charles Berling) and office enemy Elise (Chloë Sevigny) seem to know her secret and can easily use it against her for their own purposes. As the stakes grow higher and Diane ventures into deadlier territory, Assayas explores the connections between multinational businesses and extreme underground media as well as the many ways 21st-century reality increasingly resembles violent, disorienting fiction.

This new restoration, the unrated director’s cut of “Demonlover,” opens at Film at Lincoln Center on February 12. Watch the new restoration trailer below.