104 min | R | August 20, 2021 | IFC Midnight
Neill Blomkamp scans actors into a digital purgatory and sends a woman into her comatose mother’s mind to confront the demon riding inside her. The technology is the most interesting thing in the room. That is the problem.
Carly is estranged from her mother for reasons the film parcels out slowly. Her mother lies comatose, and a medical company has built a way to enter her mind through a digital simulation. Carly agrees to go inside. Neill Blomkamp uses that conceit to stage a haunted-house story across two worlds, one rendered in flesh and one rendered in stuttering volumetric capture. The film is really about a daughter trying to outrun an inheritance, and it never trusts that human thread enough to build on it.
Carly Pope plays Carly with a guarded flatness that reads as trauma early and as absence later. She holds the screen alone for long stretches and the script gives her almost nothing to push against. Nathalie Boltt plays Angela, the mother, in fragments and projections, and the disconnection is the only register she gets to play. Chris William Martin and Kandyse McClure orbit Carly as Martin and Sam without enough specificity to register as people. The cast commits to the dread, but the writing leaves them reacting to a premise instead of inhabiting characters.
Blomkamp writes and directs, and his fascination sits entirely in the digital realm. The volumetric-capture sequences turn the actors into glitching point-cloud figures whose movements lag and tear, and the effect is genuinely unsettling for a few minutes. Then the device repeats with no escalation. The real-world scenes are shot flat and dark, and the editing strings jump scares together without building the pressure between them that horror requires. The sound design leans on stingers where atmosphere would do more work.
The film has one good idea and spends its length looking for a story to attach it to. Blomkamp keeps reaching for a religious-conspiracy plot in the back half that arrives unearned and resolves nothing. The digital purgatory should be the engine of the dread. Instead it functions as a tech demo bolted onto a thin possession story. Demonic mistakes a striking image for a reason to exist.