Movie Review (Cinequest Cinejoy): Demon
Thriller, horror, surrealism, dark comedy, and neo noir elements — director George Louis Bartlett’s genre-mashing Demon has all of those and more. It’s an ambitious independent film from the United Kingdom that is sometimes grounded and sometimes all over the map, but always intriguing. Ralph (Ryan Walker-Edwards) goes on the run after a small fine he incurred while oversleeping past his stop on a train balloons into a large amount that he can’t afford to pay. With the help of his friend Kent (Jacob Hawley), he holes up in an old forest motel to try to elude a bailiff bent on collecting the fine. While there, he goes through a series of real and imagined situations ranging from the bizarre to the terrifying to the deadly. Bartlett, who cowrote the screenplay with Theo McDonald, has created an interesting character in Ralph and surrounded him with quirky characters and weird proceedings. Shot mostly in black-and-white, the director knows his budgetary limitations
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