One person's nightmare is another's reality.

``Demonlover'' is a thriller revolving around deception, virtual reality, sexual fetishes and violence. If you didn't like the surrealistic worlds of David Lynch's ``Lost Highway'' and David Cronenberg's ``Videodrome,'' this is not a movie for you. It has a similarly nightmarish quality, leading viewers through an inescapable maze.

For director Olivier Assayas, a 50-year-old Frenchman, however, none of this is far from everyday life.

``It's a nightmare that's close to our reality,'' he said in a recent interview in Tokyo. ``Many critics say the film has disconnected elements and moves by leaps, but that's how I see reality. That's how we live.''

The world of ``Demonlover'' is not pleasant. Hardhearted businesswoman Diane (Connie Nielsen) climbs the corporate ladder by drugging her boss during a business trip. This lifts her to the No. 2 spot in the Volf Group and puts her in charge of merger negotiations with Tokyo Anime, the world's largest producer of animated sex videos.

Diane's real aim, however, is to sabotage the deal, because she's actually a double agent working for rival firm Mangatronics, which fears being driven out of business if the merger goes ahead.

Isolated in a world of corporate power struggles, Diane thinks she can maintain her cover until she completes her mission, but things start to go wrong when co-workers Elise (Chloe Sevigny) and Herve (Charles Berling) figure out what she's up to and blackmail her.

One day, Diane is kidnapped, blindfolded and taken to a room where she is videotaped on a bed. She subsequently slips into a state of paranoia, unable to distinguish friend from foe, or reality from a computer-created virtual world.

Assayas says the inspiration for ``Demonlover'' came from observing the drastic changes the world is going through.

``I wanted to make a film that was in touch with my perception of the world,'' he explains.

``Like most people in the contemporary world, I travel. I'm confronted with different cultures. I watch films. I'm on the Internet. I watch TV. And I read the newspaper,'' he continues. ``Ultimately I have a much richer, much broader notion of the world than previous generations, who were more deeply rooted in their local realities. Here, we still have our roots, but we are constructing relationships with other cultures of the world and other values. It's not something that's stabilized. I think we are in the middle of the mess of it.''

``Demonlover'' resembles the mishmash of cultures and values that Assayas describes. It travels from France to Japan. The cast is cosmopolitan: Danish (Nielsen), American (Sevigny), French (Berling) and Japanese (Nao Omori). And the language shifts from English to French.

The trick for viewers is to follow the flow of ``Demonlover,'' a sensual film that pays great attention to detail. Assayas makes no attempt to present a conventional narrative. What starts out as a cyberpunk spy flick gradually soon makes no sense, then descends into delirium, in which reality and the fantasy of a computer-generated world mingle on screen.

``Conventional narratives give us a false view of the world,'' Assayas says. ``They delude us into the notion that the world is not changing, that we live in stability and safety. There is no safety in the world we live in.''

The twist in ``Demonlover'' will horrify some viewers, who will leave the cinema hoping the real world they're returning to is not as revolting as the one they've just seen.

``The film is about how reality is losing ground to fantasy, how we are losing touch with humanity and reality,'' Assayas says.

DEMONLOVER Opens March 12 * 120 minutes, in English and French * Theater Image Forum in Tokyo

(IHT/Asahi: February 25,2005)