Pandemonium

A spectacular landscape is soon focused down by writer and director Quarxx to a lonely mountain road where Nathan (Hugo Dillon) is looking on the aftermath of a car accident, considering himself lucky to be alive.

He’s challenged on this by Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj) from the side of the road who states that they are both dead, he having been killed by Nathan while he was on his motorbike. Nathan remains in denial until his corpse is dragged out of the car.

Then two doorways appear. Daniel hears pleasant music coming out of one while Nathan hears misery out of the other. Nathan has a heavy secret that when means he just passes through heaven’s gate going nowhere. But Daniel is not in the clear either as when a little girl appears saying Daniel had killed her on his bike, due to drink his drink and drive. She disappears into heaven and the gate disappears.

Frustrated Nathan kicks Daniel through to hell, though he can’t hang around as an entity forces him through into a hellscape strewn with corpses. It’s an eerily beautiful image of sand and ochre brilliantly composed with Nathan picking his way through he lifts the cloth off a little girl and we are taken into her story. A very disturbing story of brutal murder and disfigurement, manipulation and madness; a Grand Guignol. That story ends and Nathan lifts another for a distressing tale of bullying and a parent unable to understand what her daughter is going through then only able to deal with the consequences through extreme guilt. Stories over its Nathan’s turn to learn his fate.

With references to Dante the film in the hellscape and towards the end, Pandemonium (itself the capitol of Hell though from Milton’s Paradise Lost) has an essence of Gustav Dore’s illustrations of The Inferno.

Up until the final sequence the film is satisfyingly grotesque in the way that anything to do with children acting against a presumed type (as per Who Could Kill a Child) has by creating a great unease and here with a determined cruelty on the part of Quarxx. There is still an element of taboo about this sort of thing. Also, frankly, it’s a relatively simple way of making people feel very uneasy and I’d suggest overused here with three stories concerning children.

Pandemonium drops into more conventional hell mode towards the end even flirting towards comedy, possibly inadvertently, and an unsatisfactory ending. For all the hell, heaven and demons, there’s nothing that profound here no great questions asked let alone answers provided.

Technically it is sublime beautifully filmed throughout with an soundtrack that is carefully geared toward the scene using an eerie incessant drone where necessary to quite bizarre playful number during the first story.

Pandemonium had its UK Premiere at London FrightFest in August 2023.