Make no mistake about it - Demonlover - the brash and bracing new cyber thriller that daringly describes modern global society as a sexed-up, sadistic video game face-off - is a brilliant masterpiece of vision and technology that makes it the most relevant and disturbing film of 2003.

Olivier Assayas, the versatile French filmmaker who brought us the memorably witty filmmaking satire Irma Vep and the sprawling romantic wartime epic Les Destinees, has mounted an ambitious thriller that couldn't be more timely or topical. It seamlessly fuses our global obsessions with cyber technology, video games, human cruelty and cutthroat business.

On one level the film charts the harrowing story of Diane (Connie Nielsen), a high-ranking executive in a mega-huge European corporation, negotiating the unstable acquisition of a controversial, Japanime-like creator of the world's most sophisticated web and video game porn and violence. Two other high-tech firms (one named Demonlover) are in hot pursuit of exclusive rights to the corporation's new images on the `net. It turns out Diane is spying for one and intent on destroying the other. When she discovers an unexpected link between the business deal and a bizarre, sadistic underground website named "The Hellfire Club" (shades of David Cronenberg's violent cable station in Videodrome), the film takes an unexpected, surreal turn.

Also along for the ride are three powerfully drawn supporting characters - jaded, corrupt co-worker Herve (Charles Berling), oppositional and mysterious lower-level assistant, Elise (Chloe Sevigny), and gutsy and stylish American corporate shark, Elaine (Gina Gershon).

Connie Nielsen, a dynamic actress who Hollywood usually takes for a dolled-up wife or girlfriend, jumps to the center of this spectacle with tough as nails authority and grit. And Chloe Sevigny, speaking fluent French and poker-faced, emerges here from her string of laid back American roles as an anti-siren who may or may not hold the key to the mysteries of Demonlover's intrigue and double-crosses. Ditto Gina Gershon, an actress who made her name on cutting the very image of feline sensuality layered over a teasing, brainy intellect.

Assayas has written three fascinating women, and the actresses are one of recent cinema's most memorable ensembles. But the provocative performances aren't all there is to them. There is great pleasure to be had in watching the aesthetics of clothing, hair, make-up, luscious cinematography (and I'm not talking about the leering kind) and lighting that serves up three independent, two-fisted, stylish visions of femme grandeur. Assayas gives us three vixens waxed and coiffed so perfectly, yet hard-as-nails, stalking through Demonlover with such style that they haunt the film itself.

What essentially begins as a corporate spy thriller morphs midway into a more diabolically sinister, corrosive take on contemporary global zeitgeist, filtered through the lens of postmodern video game sadism and internet fetish run amok.

As written and directed by Assayas, Demonlover becomes an ultra-slick and gripping portrait of a society driven and defeated by technology, sex and power games, plunging into nihilistic darkness. The film feels so absolutely, currently right on target with its assertion that life today is filtered through and lived like a sadistic multimedia experience - cold, stylish, devoid of emotion or consequence for violence - and finally, as inescapable and suffocating.

Demonlover, with its relentlessly cynical and savage take on a society gone wrong in the face of global commerce and electronic media domination, takes no prisoners - well, maybe just one, in its brilliant and telling final scene.