Pandemonium
Such is the case with "Pandemonium," a French horror anthology from the writer/director Quarxx. The first 30 minutes is a gripping tale about two men involved in a car accident who gradually come to realize that they are dead. Nathan (Hugo Dillon) struggles to deal with this realization, while Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj) has reached an almost zen-like state of acceptance. The scene is almost entirely dialogue-driven, and the two actors capably run through the various stages of grief while giving the audience a decent idea of what kind of people they are. Suddenly, two sets of doors show up in the road, both pretty clearly representing gateways to heaven and hell. Both men believe they deserve heaven, but it quickly becomes apparent that the doorway to hell is the only one available to them.
It's a banger of an opening set piece, and as the two men pass through the doorway, most people will rightly be on the edge of their seats. Unfortunately, things screech to a halt as we move on to a different story, and we don't get back to the primary thread until there's about 15 minutes left in the movie. Nathan goes through the door and sees bodies scattered around him in various stages of torment. As he touches them, he "sees" their life stories, which become the next sections of the anthology. Even if these next sections had been exceptional, it still would have been frustrating to move away from the wonderfully constructed opening narrative. As it happens, the following two sequences, each about a half an hour, are fairly standard, self-serious horror tales that aren't nearly engaging enough to quell the impatience to get back to the first story.
The first sequence follows an almost comically disturbed little girl living in a fabulous château. The girl kills her parents for some reason (because they don't feed her in a timely fashion?) but attributes the actual murder to her imaginary friend, a grotesque, simple-minded monster man that she bosses around. The girl's indifference and denial of what she's done isn't really explored -- we have no idea what happened in this girl's life or what, if anything, her parents have done to have her turn out this way. We know this girl is going to hell, which in itself is interesting, because a girl of a similar age went straight to heaven in the first story, presumably because she was "an innocent" child. What makes this girl different? What was the scenario that made her such an unrepentant murderer? Does she have a mental condition that makes her imagine her friend, and if so, is she still damned anyway? We never find out.
The next story is an exploration of a grieving mother's trauma, a very familiar horror movie trope during the past few years. The mother (Ophélia Kolb) ignores her daughter (Sidwell Weber) as she is bullied at school (in scenes that are painfully cliché), eventually driving her to commit suicide. The mother, consumed by guilt and grief, pretends that her daughter's corpse is still alive for a while, talking to her and telling her that they'll go to the park and spend all kinds of time together. Nothing really goes anywhere, and again, it starts to feel kind of cruel that this person will eventually end up in hell.
We eventually get back to the main story, as Nathan is ferried to his eternal fate by a bored administrative demon. It is always fascinating to see how filmmakers envision the afterlife, and Quarxx's vision is wonderfully twisted and well realized. The movie ends on a clever twist that could even be used to make a sequel, if so desired.
Ultimately, the biggest question is why Quarxx felt the need to even make this as an anthology in the first place, when there was clearly enough juice in the first story to make a full-length movie out of. The two other stories just aren't that interesting and don't really add anything interesting thematically. It's eventually revealed that most people in the world end up going to hell with very few exceptions; it's a bleak worldview for sure, and if that's the case, then what's the point in showing us the two other stories? If we are all damned, is the disturbed girl and grieving mother any more damned than the rest of us? There just doesn't seem to be enough connective tissue between the stories to make them feel like they belonged together.
There's a lot here to like -- Quarxx is a talented visual filmmaker with a lot of imagination -- but it doesn't ultimately come together to form a cohesive final product, and feels like a missed opportunity to expand on the movie's superior first section.
