MIFF Session #9: THE DEMON DISORDER

Families are hard. When you're on uneasy terms with your brothers over old grudges because your dad died for causes somewhere between dementia and demonic possession families get really hard. So, when Jake braves Graham for support after years, he really has a case. Reluctantly but fearing the worst, the pair return to the family home to sort out what youngest brother Phillip is going through. It's not going to be pretty.

Pretty? It's going to be disgustingly ugly. While this intriguing approach to a possession movie takes its time gathering itself together when it does it bolts along, springing through body horror, bush humour, and excruciating extractions of strange things from areas of human bodies. With all that silicon, movie blood and workshop-fuls of effects material there can be a lot to respond to but the cast make a lot of it, pushing themselves forward beyond the invisible curtain that the goo and viscera brings down on the scenes.

Writer/Director Steve Boyle has been a VFX maestro for the likes of The Matrix and Hobbit movies and based this screenplay off an old idea he had that posited a non-religious possession film. The session Q&A following the screening had him suggest that there were several valid interpretations of what the distress and physical afflictions on screen might mean but the starting point was his own father's dementia. A late scene in which John Noble as the father says of his advancing condition that it is pushing him out and replacing him. Without that statement in the Q&A that was where I went on seeing that scene, having experienced the disturbing effects of dementia in my grandfather.

The Demon Disorder only has to be a fun and icky romp through the troubled scission of brothers to band and fight their demons but its strength lies in the resonance of the real things beneath the story, the things that gave it birth and nurture.