claire donner’s review published on Letterboxd:
I have watched and loved this movie many a time, and so, with my ardor proven so thoroughly, I am giving myself permission to be negative for a minute: I'm so tried of long sequences where people are just trying to get out of somewhere, and screaming about how they can't get out of there, and arguing about the best way to get out of there...I realize that it's an organic part of lots and lots of horror stories, but it is so rarely entertaining in practice. I'm complaining about this as a generic problem with many horror movies, but DEMONS seems to provide a perfect example of what I'm talking about, exactly because so much of it is so gloriously over the top, which throws into relief the dreariness of people just like, breaking up furniture and wandering around in empty halls and looking around empty rooms, and bickering with each other. I just feel like, unless you're making THE DESCENT or something where the remarkable environment itself is a huge part of the threat, maybe we can just spend A LITTLE BIT of time addressing the fact that the characters can't leave the place, instead of laboriously convincing the audience for absolute sure that leaving the place is prohibitively difficult.