— Basically, we have the possibility here to kill Mangatronics. I say, let's do it!
Assayas’s obsession with the blurry line between fantasy and reality is lofty but unfocused, and the film’s meandering pace has a way of diminishing the more relevant themes that lie crippled beneath
— Ed Gonzalez (Slant Magazine)
The movie has its finger on the racing pulse of an idea that is already becoming a cliché. Is our virtual culture of violent images and hyperactive stimulation sabotaging our humanity? Might the technological games we think we're mastering be programming us into becoming soulless automatons? Unlike 'The Matrix', Mr. Assayas's variation on the theme comes without philosophical baggage and has no hero.
— Stephen Holden (The New York Times)
At times, demonlover plays like the most paranoid fantasies of anti-globalization and anti-porn activists. But Assayas has locked on to some ugly truths about corporate and private life and about our relation to technology right now, and what he's saying is no more dismissible because it's obvious.[…]
If there's any storytelling model for demonlover, it may be Howard Hawks' film of The Big Sleep, whose insanely labyrinthine plot becomes less important than the feeling of a miasma of corruption in which connections are too dense and deep to ever be fully understood.
— Charles Taylor (Salon)
I think that if most guys in America could somehow get their fave-rave poster girl in bed and have total license to do whatever they wanted with this legendary body for one afternoon, at least 75 percent of the guys in the country would elect to beat her up.
Synopsis: A French corporation goes head-to-head with an American web media company for the rights to a 3-D manga pornography studio, resulting in a power struggle that culminates in violence and espionage.