Streaming
  • February 19, 2021 through March 4, 2021
New Restoration

“Movie of the Moment … 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.”

Serge Kaganski, Film Comment

In French arthouse cinema at the turn of the new millennium, there was a trend toward the transgressive that earned the name (slash content warning) ​“New French Extremity.” Director Olivier Assayas joined the company of other ​“Extreme” auteurs (Gaspar Noé, Bruno Dumont, Catherine Breillat, and Claire Denis among them) with this gnarly 2002 techno-thriller. A feverish tale of corporate espionage and adult entertainment in the burgeoning online era, Demonlover centres on the activities of a spy (Connie Nielsen) infiltrating the ranks of a multinational media conglomerate vying for control of the Japanese hentai (or anime porn) dot-com market. As she goes deeper and more dangerously undercover, the distinctions between ally and enemy, reality and fiction, start to blur. Assayas’s polarizing film, rife with noir nihilism and a censor-goading supply of sex, violence, and sadomasochism, gained a cult following for its prescient vision of a disturbing, dark-web future. Sonic Youth wrote the score; Chloë Sevigny and Gina Gershon feature in the cast. This 2K restoration is of the unrated director’s cut.

“Gripping and provocative.” Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“[A] brilliant, bleak work.” Anton Bitel, Little White Lies

To stream this film:
Click on the ​“Stream” button above.
This will take you to Janus Films’s streaming platform, where you can watch the film.
Purchase a virtual ticket for $10 USD (you may need to create an account first).
Once a virtual ticket has been purchased, you have seven days to start watching the film.
Once you begin, you have seven days to finish watching.
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This film is available to stream in Canada only.

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Advisory: Includes scenes of graphic sex and violence.

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