Arrow Video: Pandemonium (2023) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Arrow Video

Ever since Dante Alighieri unveiled his 14^th century poem The Divine Comedy or Dante’s Inferno which chronicled the travelogue of an ordinary man through the many circles of Hell on his way out to Heaven, filmmakers and artists have been making multimedia projects about it.  Whether it be the 1911 Italian gargantuan silent epic Dante’s Inferno, the videogame from the 2010s, Jacob’s Ladder and finally the videogame-to-film Silent Hill, the idea of the underworld of eternal damnation and torment for evil or sinful souls to reside in keeps coming back to the silver screen for good or for ill.  Whether it be a burlesque party or a dark gothic fable, there’s always room for the Devil and his infernal empire.
 
The latest rumination on the Inferno of Dante comes in the form of a mercurial multimedia visual artist who goes by the moniker Quarxx who initially started with paintings and still photographs before moving onto short films and eventually his first feature All the Gods in the Sky in 2018.  A unique photorealistic phantasmagorical surrealist with emphasis on body horror, child fears and elements of the New French Extremity, the visual artist returned to the director’s chair in 2023 following a near death experience that gave him the urge to tackle the afterlife with his visually fabulous descent into Hell Pandemonium coming to limited edition blu-ray release from Arrow Video.  The film is as close to a futuristic vision of the inferno imagined by Dante Alighieri as contemporary cinema has yet come.
 
Nathan (Hugo Dillon) awakens on the side of the road somewhere in the mountains choking with a thick fog bank when he comes across another man named Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj).  As Nathan investigates the car accident, it dawns on him he is looking at his lifeless body and that he has in fact died.  With both men coming to terms with their deaths, Nathan and Daniel encounter a doorway in the open terrain leading to the unknown.  Hastily walking through the door into some sort of ethereal void, Nathan films himself stepping over bodies of tormented souls and accidentally touching any of them triggers a flashback vision into each character’s respective Hell, so to speak.  Among the tormented are a sociopathic little girl named Jeanne (Manon Maindivide), Julia (Ophélia Kolb) a grieving mother wallowing in madness following her daughter’s suicide and the unholy vigil Norghul (Jean Rousseau) tasked with guiding Nathan to his dark destiny.

 
Partially a reimagining of Dante Alighieri by way of Silent Hill, marrying the horrific and fabulous with an overarching sense of doom and somber melancholia, Quarxx’s official second feature film Pandemonium is like an adrenaline shot to The Divine Comedy.  Visionary, morbid and hopeless with a mixture of real-world documentary realism interspersed with the increasingly fantastical and otherworldly, this French promenade through Hell while carrying echoes of Jigoku or more recently The Beyond finds a unique visual aesthete and emotionally draining mood to conjure up demonic activity the likes of which hasn’t been seen onscreen before.  Bleak and horrific, full of imagery both painterly and repulsively disgusting, the film composed in panoramic 2.35:1 widescreen features three cinematographers including but not limited to Didier Daubeach, Hugo Poisson and Colin Wandersman.  The soundtrack by Benjamin Leray from start to finish is like a thick drippy sponge of sorrow and dread that pours out freely once squeezed.

 
Narrowed down to a small cast of characters with Hugo Dillon as the film’s protagonist navigating the Hellscape, the actor conveys onscreen a sense of practical humor and anxiety that makes the situation more relatable and therefore more horrific when the tides start to turn against the hero Nathan.  Arben Bajraktaraj is good in his brief introductory portion of the film but once he’s off, the film stays with Nathan as he saunters hopelessly from body to body in the void of Pandemonium.  Special attention goes to Manon Maindivide as an adorable little princess demon who kills her parents and blames it on the deformed Tony (Carl Laforêt from The Cursed) who stuffs his ugly mug with peanut butter jelly sandwiches to highly revolting effect.  Then there’s Ophélia Kolb who is tasked with portraying an excruciating suicide scenario that is as hard to watch as it must’ve been to act.

 
Second to the cast is the production design and makeup artists such as Olivier Afonso who jointly conjure up some dark and disturbing imaginings of what happens to us when we die.  In a scene that seems to push the proceedings even further into existential despair and horror, a damned soul tortured and destroyed gets the chance to reincarnate the Antichrist and is shown through footage of a real authentic childbirth filmed and edited into the picture.  This queasy mixture of mortality, horror and the beginning of life paints an unpleasant picture of the cycle of life not all viewers will take to or digest easily.  For all of the attempts at Dante Alighieri on film either direct or slightly related to the text and visions contained therein, Pandemonium easily hits the hardest.  Despite having a fraction of the budgets of the Hellfire and Brimstone big screen visions that have come before, this somehow creeps under the skin and into our own souls in ways few if any horror films have ever been able to pinpoint.

 
Hitting blu-ray disc with a reversible poster and collectible slipcover at the end of May with several extras including a making-of featurette, behind-the-scenes footage of the aforementioned childbirth sequence, interviews with the director and makeup artist and footage of the Paris premiere, Pandemonium is rough, somber, depressing horror that starts out with its head hung low only to sink further and further into chaotic torment.  Painterly and painful, filled with a number of heavy backstories involving some of Hell’s denizens, this audiovisual extravaganza of New French Extreme transgressive shock mixed with Old Testament Wrath of God Boschian imagery is a bit like having an anchor tied to your ankle before you are tossed overboard watching yourself descend into darkness.  For those who want fun scares with wild kills with lots of blood and guts, look hard elsewhere as this one will go out of its way to make you feel really bad.  But for those keen on existentialism and the new auteur Quarxx’s unique blend of visceral horror and elegant painterly composition are going to be floored by where this one dares to go.  Unhappy but unmissable!

--Andrew Kotwicki