“Hell is empty and all the devils are here,” reads the text – a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (Act 1, Scene 2) – that opens Andrew de Burgh’s latest feature The Demoness. What is meant by ‘here’ is spelt out by the following image of the Los Angeles skyline at night, as the city will be exposed, via several small-scale dramas taking place within it, to be an infernal locus of resident evil and casual malice, where the true devils are housed by humanity itself. There may be, as the title promises, a red-coated, dimension-slipping succubus (Sydney Culbertson) – with angular movements, bat-like facial features and Nosferatu-like shadowplay – prowling these mean streets for prey to torment and slay, but really the denizens of this metropolis are already doomed long before she arrives for her bit of fun.
Her first victims are husband and wife Jack Gerrard (Xander Bailey) and Sarah Lallana (Bella Glanville), who instantly recall the similarly unhappy couple from de Burgh’s previous The Seductress from Hell (2024). After all, Jack is a disgruntled salesman, Sarah is unemployed and expected to find a job even as her domestic labours go unappreciated, and they are already bitterly at each other’s throats even before the demoness briefly enters their lives to end them. Here much of the demoness’ dirty work, like Jack’s, ends up being done by Sarah, who takes to it with a sadistic enthusiasm that surprises even herself.
After the Demoness makes a deal with Lucifer (Mark Pontarellu) to be granted human form on a trial basis (a blessed relief, given how difficult it is to understand the guttural timbre of her speech as a monster), she pursues more victims. Perhaps the most morally problematic is the first. For while a privileged ‘tech bro’ and self-confessed ‘money hungry bastard’, Steve Urden (Riley Nottingham) seems a genuinely nice, if dim, guy, more interested in his dancefloor pickup ‘Charlotte’ for her “empathy, kindness, patience, morality and definitely a lot of compassion” than for her model good looks, even if Charlotte herself recognises that he is ‘gaslighting’ her with a surface decency that is merely performative, while really all he wants is to fuck her.
Other victims are more straightforwardly wicked. Charlotte’s new neighbours Yagami Minamino (Akihiro Kitamura), his wife Tamara (Amelia Gotham) and his terminally ill sister Saori (Haruka Igarashi) may seem a picture of middle-class suburban gentility, but harbour some very dark secrets and a viciousness that almost matches the Demoness’ own brand of evil. Steve’s work colleague Brad Henriksen (Bruce Clifford) is corrupt and cutthroat, as is the police detective (Dallas Schaefer) who happily takes Brad’s bribes and does the devil’s work for him. There is a sense that all these characters are only getting, in an exaggerated form, what they deserve – and indeed what they themselves mete out – in an LA that is not merely shallow but empty and damned. For this is a place where the Demoness and Lucifer need only enter a random nightclub to find easy pickings for their soul-gathering predations, since everybody is already in a metaphorical hell, and bound for the real one.
“Just one drink?”, says Tamara, trying to persuade new neighbour Charlotte to throw her teetotalling caution to the wind – a caution that is well-earned, given Charlotte’s own inclination to spike cocktails and posion guests. “Even like the film”, continues Tamara, holding up a Blu-ray of Andrew de Burgh’s 2015 short Just One Drink, which also featured a character named Tamara – and torturous acts of demonic revenge. The short’s message – “fucked-up people deserve fucked-up deaths” – is replayed here at greater length but similarly low budget, as one after another the ordinary people are shown getting their devilish comeuppance from unforgiving forces beyond their comprehension.
Faced with this everyday world of pleasure seekers, plunderers and parasites, the Demoness will declare, “I have a lot of work I need to get done.” For there is a consistency of vision between de Burgh’s short Just One Drink, his feature The Seductress From Hell and now The Demoness, almost as though they are all telling chapters of the same hellish story – and his latest film suggests a million LA stories of which these are just three or four, and confronts viewers with the question of just how immune they would be to similar temptation and transgression, and how safe from depravity and damnation. For on this crowded floor, under these glitzy neon lights, we are all dancing close to the devil.
strap: Andrew de Burgh’s low-budget moral parable tells several LA stories whose human characters are already prey to devilish temptation
© Anton Bitel
