Luminal

Demon is a beautiful flower growing on the worst human dung.

Although based in the future, the atmosphere of the film reminds me of the dark 19th century Paris of Emile Zola, who said: `All I care about is life, struggle, and intensity'. It also seems to be Vecchiato's approach.

Like most of us, I have been at this point in life where you realise that there is no safe middle ground anymore: From now, things can either go all wrong or all right. It is an ultimately frightening, violent, emotion that is very subtlety depicted in the film: You can see in Demon's big eyes that she is desperately scared and completely alone despite her friendship with Davi. It is terrifying, and really touched me.

And impressive camera work: the sequences of the streets of Paris are mesmerising.

Oh dear. Although at times visually beautiful, with some nice production design and interesting costumes, this is a painfully bad exercise in style over substance. It is pretentious in the extreme, with some of the worst dialogue I've heard in years. The wafer-thin narrative follows several irritating and artfully screwed-up characters drifting from scene to scene and whining that their lives are just a "streak of s***ty brown". In all, it is pointless and shallow, and one to avoid.

The story here is quite simple: The freedom journey of two whores and their re-capture by the ugly french pimp. But this film is unique in its aesthetic perception of the events, which gives us a more intimate narrative, using colour, sound and different moods of photography to convey the quest for freedom.

There are some camera movements in the film that surely will become this director's signature style. The film shows a brilliant work of rhythm, a good sense of control over the narrative and a great flow between one atmosphere to another: from dream-like Paris to real-life London, from a sober mood to a drugged and dazed one.

This is a work of someone who knows what they're doing, and how to do it. Though I would have told the story differently, that is a very personal and beautiful work.

The film starts very promising, and certainly looks very good at least for the first half.

But it is completely unstructured and unengaging, so you probably need to do some of the many drugs that are consumed in the film to find this interesting; if you can stomach the incredible self-indulgent and pretentious dialog the film suffers under.

As the director said at the Q and A after the film: 'I didn't think the script was very believable so I thought it would work by setting it in the future'- do I need to say any more?