In between demonlover’s frigid boardroom calculations and quietly cutthroat merger meetings, Diane (Connie Nielsen), supposed representative of the Paris-based conglomerate, The Volf Group, receives a massage in her hotel suite. Ostensibly a moment of relaxation to buffer the ruthless oneupsmanship that defines her (ultimately transitory) position within the company’s hierarchy, the massage seems not to soothe Diane’s body; rather, the pulling, stretching, and thumping of her back, arms, and legs appears more akin to the jackhammering of concrete. Her joints lightly crack, the muscles are yanked taut, her skin is rubbed raw—it’s an erasing of flesh. In Assayas’s nightmarishly contemporary world, flesh seems to be on its way out, victim to an emerging market in which everything is commodified, where sex and violence aren’t just accessible but easy to own. Loss of identity here segues into the digital realm—a sort of Persona for the age of media saturation.

Assayas’s landscape is one of accoutrements: water bottles, first-class airline bread baskets, ATMs, cell phones, credit card machines spewing receipts. Swathed in objects, demonlover’s players need not grapple with trivialities like moral value or soul-searching. Chloë Sevigny’s Elise is consistently upstaged by her designer blouses, while Gina Gershon’s terribly self-assured Elaine (her tight tee-shirts are ironic billboards, her zip-up ankle-high boots as deflective as steel armor) is only as confident as her fashion sense allows. Brand names take the place of skin—Diane pinpricks a drugged syringe into the foil cover of her competitor Karen’s single-serve Evian cup as if it were flesh. Techno-gadgets replace human interaction—when Chloë transfers the files from Karen’s palm pilot to her own, she’s sucking the very essence from her colleague, already incapacitated in the hospital. (Usually expertly contained, Charles Berling, shaven and bloated, seems to have an excess of flesh here. His Hervé, both lazy and predatory, the tortoise and the hare rolled into one, is all bulbous, protoplasmic lumps.)

As in all Assayas films, everything is tactile, as if you could brush your fingers across the screen and feel the trace of a cheek. Skin is a commodity itself, it can be bought, sold, and desecrated. Assayas doesn’t get as literal as Cronenberg (for me, Videodrome’s videotape-swallowing abdomen always seemed like a rather tacky device), and the film is all the more resonant for it. In their casually desperate ploys to claim a chunk of the multimedia pornography and violence industry, Diane, Hervé, and Elise end up as facsimiles of their former selves, slaves to its base supply and demand mentality. In a night-time car ride through a rainstorm, Assayas shoots through the splattered windshield. As the scene progresses, the raindrops appear to pop and dissolve on the actresses’ faces like pixels. The turning point in the film, it is here that we see the dissolution of flesh into something more alterable—the beginning of an inexorable downward spiral that will lead Diane to a new kind of hell on Earth, as a mere collection of digits on a 12-inch monitor.