What starts off as promising quickly turns tedious in Demonlover, a film that is supposed to be about corporate espionage and the dotcom industry. Diane de Monx (Connie Nielsen, Basic, The Hunted) wants to move up in her company. Enough so that at the beginning of the film, she poisons her co-worker Karen (Dominique Reymond, Les Destinees, In My Skin). With Karen incapacitated, her firm gives her the lead on the negotiations with Demonlover.com, a Japanese site that peddles extremely adult anime for eagerly paying customers. Aside from this basic point, Demonlover begins descending, literally and figuratively, into a deep chasm from which it is never able to climb out.

It's kind of a shame too, since writer/director Olivier Assayas (Les Destinees, Late August, Early September) goes about everything so stylishly. Diane and her coworkers work in sparse, almost sterile looking offices, devoid of warmth and life, much like Diane's character. And everybody is just as ruthless as she is. Now she is working on the Demonlover account with Herve (Charles Berling, Les Destinees, Stardom), who eagerly plays Diane against Karen's assistant Elise (Chloe Sevigny, Party Monster, American Psycho), who really detests Diane.

Things heat up even more when Demonlover rep Elaine Si Gibril (Gina Gershon, Slackers, Driven). Diane's company discovers that Diane and her coworkers apparently run Hellfire.com, a hardcore bondage/fetish site. So let's see, hardcore anime and bondage. What does Assayas do with this? He gives viewers ample time to look at the anime (pixelated, of course) and said bondage. It serves no purpose, artistically, or plotwise, and seems nothing more than prurient. Think feardotcom except much better (and it's still bad).

As the story progresses, it seems that there is more to Diane than one initially thinks. However, by the time Assayas reveals everything, nobody cares anymore. There's lots of sneaking around and angry glares, but most of it is for nothing. Nielsen, who has recently been circling in a series of bland second-billed roles, gets top billing here, and does better than her other recent efforts, but Demonlover is so convoluted that her performance gets just as lost as the plot. Demonlover forgets what it is about and begins to go on random tangents that lead nowhere and just take up time.