Director: Martin Gerigk
Writer: Martin Gerigk
Running time: 19mins
After the wake of human ambition that was 2025’s Prayer of the Sea, watching Martin Gerigk’s effort from a year earlier feels like a more fitting monument to what has since passed.
Demi-Demons is a playfully-constructed, intricately layered experimental short – hinging on animated collages that breathe new life and meaning into repurposed photographs and visual fragments. Split across multiple chapters, lifted from a fictional sacred tome, the film charts an abstract history of evolution – with initial cell mitosis among the most basic of life forms eventually morphing into fish, and after some time, human beings.
For all our biological sophistication, however, the fact remains we are ultimately just highly evolved fish. And here Gerigk starts to have fun with his story – as he reaches and surpasses the modern era, to examine how those original impulses might trap us in an increasingly amorphous, alienated future.
Each chapter begins with a vague citation of Libre Anguillae – (in modern English, The Book of the Eel). A creepy parody of biblical verse – often creepy in its own right – the text foretells a strange coming devolution which is experienced by two on-screen figures. A man and a woman stand naked in a laboratory, and receive an initial instruction: “Thou shalt not unlink the sacred codes.”
Echoing the fall of Adam and Eve, the book then tells us “After eating of the divine egg, they sought new manners of enticement.” Having obtained some kind of devine knowledge, the book then begins to warn of the further dangers of “elevating thy level of awareness”, before devolving into a disjointed binary, “10100010101010101010 [and so on]”.
In between these chapters, the two figures – animated from old black and white imagery, in a way reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s Python-era cartoons – transgress each warning. Delving deeper into scientific and technological change as the film progresses, soon they begin to experiment with body-augmentations and mutations. Suddenly they have flailing tendrils at the ends of their limbs, or The Last of Us-like coral outcrops sprouting around their heads. The further they go down this road, chasing pleasure and perfection, the further they move from a workable world – and the laws of physics seem to break down around them. A prologue concludes with the two figures fused together, limping through a barren and bare Earth.
So, what does all that mean? Any interpretation of an experimental film (or indeed any film generally) is liable to be highly subjective. But it feels as though this is a treatise on the way we are finding that, as a species, we are spectacularly unequipped to handle the pandora’s box our technology has opened over the last two centuries.
We like to think that we remain masters of our impulses, but the internet age has provided the opportunity to engage in constant, instant gratification for many people – and amid that, the eel will out. The social media empires many of us are now compulsively immersed in show cash in on sensory stimulation that taps into our base instincts – but the temporary relief those instincts chase only serve to alienate us from ourselves, and our crumbling communities.
Place an eel – a voracious consumer, which serves a relentless impulse to pursue sustenance at all costs – in a world of over-abundance, and it will eat itself to death. Connected to this, perhaps we have mistaken ourselves as infallible in our pursuit of relentless self-improvement, satisfaction, and knowledge; when ultimately, we are incapable of disconnecting ourselves from “the sacred codes” at our evolutionary core, and we increasingly find ourselves beholden to them in a hostile world of our own making.
These are interesting talking points now. But returning to 2025, it is also hard to take, when you know that this filmmaker fell so spectacularly down another rabbit-hole in his latest film – abandoning the tightly crafted environments of this film, as well as its deeply weird visuals and poignant philosophical points, and boiling the ocean in the process to produce something as bland and unimaginative as the slop that was Prayer of the Sea.
The animations of Demi-Demons might be a little rough and ready by modern standards. The movements of the living collage might be limited compared to the majestic scope of a David Firth animation. They might take a lot more time and effort to create – and they might not have been well rewarded in the past. But they are still preferable a million times over to what has come since – and when the gasping novelty of AI ‘art’ wears off, the differentiator of human-made meaning will win out. At least on the independent scene. I hope Gerigk returns to it on the basis of this film.
A strange, mesmerising work of non-Euclidean geometries and seaborn curses, Demi-Demons is an enjoyable experimental meditation on the trappings of ‘progress’. Its warnings should have been heeded more closely by its own director.