Demonlover is a 2002 French neo-noir thriller film written and directed by Olivier Assayas, and starring Connie Nielsen, Charles Berling, Chloë Sevigny, and Gina Gershon.

The plot focuses on the entanglement between various corporations vying for the financial control of an interactive 3-D hentai company, resulting in a power struggle that culminates in violence and espionage.

[3] Diane de Monx is an executive trying to negotiate a deal to acquire the rights to the productions of a Japanese anime studio, which will soon include three-dimensional hentai, for the French-based Volf Corporation.

To facilitate the acquisition, she debilitates her superior, Karen, and assumes control of her portfolio, her business partner Hervé, and her assistant Elise.

Having acquired the rights, the Volf Corporation attempts to enter into a deal for distribution with an American Internet company called Demonlover, represented by Elaine Si Gibril.

Meanwhile, Diane discovers that Elaine's company is a front for a website called the Hellfire Club, an interactive torture site on the dark web that broadcasts extreme sadomasochism in real-time.

A violent struggle ensues, and Diane slashes Elaine's throat with a piece of broken glass before suffocating her with a pillow in a supply closet outside the room.

Returning to the Volf offices alone, Diane manages to log onto the Hellfire Club website, which displays disturbing footage and images of women being sexually tortured.

Writer Rosanna Maule describes the film as one preoccupied with the over-saturation of digital media culture and globalization, and the roles they play in the "formation of the economic, ideological, and social.

"[4] Upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, Demonlover was noted for the disintegrated nature of its final act, which has been described by critic Jonathan Romney as "fall[ing] into an apparent lapse of incoherence.

"[6] Critic Thierry Jousse similarly wrote that this quality of the film exhibits "the vertigo of sameness...  a no man's land of time changes, of diffused projections, of mental images, of tricky perspectives, of disconnected spaces of ghostly gaps.

"[8] At the time, Nielsen had recently completed the big-budget historical drama Gladiator (2000), but was impressed enough by the screenplay that she agreed to star: "I've always done big and small movies.

[12] The film's soundtrack album features eight tracks by the band Sonic Youth, as well as songs by Goldfrapp, Death in Vegas, Dub Squad, Soulfly, [Thee Silver Mt.

[15] It was subsequently released theatrically in France on 6 November 2002, and in the United States on 19 September 2003 by Palm Pictures, premiering in Los Angeles in its original unrated cut.

"[1] Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly wrote of the film: "For an hour or so, Demonlover is an entrancingly devious soap opera of executive decadence.

When Gina Gershon shows up, playing an American entrepreneur who may or may not be linked to a website that features forbidden sexual torture, her hostile lubriciousness only thickens the atmosphere of cutthroat desire...

The movie morphs into a ”dream,” all right, but I confess that all I wanted to do was wake up from it and return to the slithery intrigue of corporate depravity.

"[22] In a 2021 retrospective review, J. Hoberman of The New York Times wrote: "The movie struck many as annoyingly trendy when it premiered at Cannes in 2002.

As a bonus feature on the two-disc edition, a secret code (found in the text printed on the DVD itself) can be entered to gain access to the unedited Hellfire Club footage.