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| Images courtesy of Extralucid Films |
While cinema over the century has been obsessed with the
notion of Dante Alighieri’s 14th century The Divine Comedy
suggesting a dark fiery pit of eternal despair and madness, newcomer French
director Quarxx between his debut surrealist horror film All the Gods in the
Sky and his 2023 riff on the inferno Pandemonium seems to suggest we’re
already lying in Hell. If there’s an
underworld, it’ll probably look, sound, taste and feel just like ordinary life
and all of its unforgiving hardships it can throw at you. Both movies fixated on death and
transcendence to another physical plane of reality, both studies in madness
with a tragicomic sense of black humor, only two films in Quarxx has very
quickly established himself as a stoker of profoundly depressing horror spoken
of the same breath as Lars Von Trier or Gaspar Noe.
Working from his 2016 short film A Perfect Blue Sky before
being reshaped and expanded into a feature with All the Gods in the Sky
and featuring the same principal actors and crew, Quarxx’s bold and searing
debut zeroes in on Simon Dormel (Jean-Luc Couchard) a depressed and perhaps
madcap factory worker who lives at home with his bedridden and physically
deformed sister Estelle (real-life deformed model and actress Melanie Gaydos). Prompted by a childhood game of gunplay and
an accident gone tragically wrong, Simon following post-traumatic stress
disorder and therapy soon starts coming off the rails believing
extraterrestrials are going to come and save them both, culminating in a
steadily intensifying crescendo of madness, murder and some dogged measure of
vengeance.
A steadily intensifying pressure cooker that goes for
guttural low blows of sorrow and anguish before slowly going insane, the first
film by Quarxx as a work of confrontational scab-peeling New French Extremity
and surreal psychological horror kicks the crotch hard and almost angrily. Much of the premise centering around Melanie
Gaydos whose real-life genetic condition of ectodermal dysplasia invariably paved
the way for a kind of bodily deformity as horror icon Javier Botet, Adam Pearson
or Kathryn Hunter. Managing to avoid
becoming exploitative with both Gaydos and Jean-Luc Couchard giving intense
physical performances as it becomes apparent this brother-sister arrangement is
far from functional, Quarxx who also edited the film works in juxtapositions
between the unforgiving sun and alien extraterrestrials suggesting the
fragility of Simon’s deteriorating psyche.
Though the aliens themselves look more than a little bit like the ones
in Fire in the Sky, their use here is closer to Gregg Araki’s Mysterious
Skin as a substitute for PTSD.
Still unavailable in the United States (please help, Arrow
Video!), this quasi-Lovecraftian tale of childhood tragedy manifesting itself as
an even more damaged or damaging adulthood is a positively searing little
number that all but imprinted writer-director-editor Quarxx on the map in the
same way a hot brand imprints itself on cattle.
Burned into you, its scars are hard to shake once finished and
audiovisually the film is firing on every cylinder. A unique mixture of horror, drama, tragicomedy
and hints of science fiction, All the Gods in the Sky intends to be a
hard pill to swallow with an unpleasant aftertaste that’s hard to get rid
of. As with his 2023 punch-in-the-face Pandemonium,
Quarxx means war in the French Extreme horror landscape with a deadpan look at
life as inescapable existential Hell.
--Andrew Kotwicki
