The cult cinema streaming service Arrow Player is no stranger to the grotesque, the bizarre, and the gloriously macabre, making it the perfect home for the French dark fantasy film, Pandemonium. This visceral and nightmarish flick, which made the rounds at film festivals like Fantasia, Frightfest, and Screamfest, is the second feature-length film from writer/director Quarxx (All the Gods in the Sky (2018)). As a multi-talented artist with experience as a painter and photographer, Quarxx has a strong personal style and a knack for capturing evocative images, which is reflected in the spine-chilling visuals throughout Pandemonium. This dark and twisted film offers up a smattering of sickening images, absurd scenarios, and twisted humor, and it will surely find its cult following among devoted Arrow Player subscribers. However, Pandemonium may struggle to succeed with a wider audience due to its fragmented storytelling and imbalanced structure. The individual parts of the movie work well; but with disconnected middle sections and a nose-dive of a final act, the film fails to merge all of its successful pieces together.
L-R: Arben Bajraktaraj as Daniel and Hugo Dillon as Nathan in PADEMONIUM. Photo courtesy of Arrow Video.
Pandemonium starts off strong with an engaging but unusual scenario. After a terrible car crash, a man named Nathan (Hugo Dillon) is relieved to find that he can walk away from the scene completely unharmed — or so he thinks. Upon speaking with the other driver from the crash, Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj), Nathan is appalled to learn that both he and Daniel have passed away. They’re now nothing more than ghosts left to look upon the aftermath of the deadly scene. Nathan is in for an even bigger shock when he learns that his actions on Earth weren’t quite good enough to grant him a pass through the pearly gates. Instead, he’s been granted a non-transferable ticket through another door, one that’s blood-red with ominous screams coming from beyond. Nathan resists his fate for as long as he can, working his way through denial, bargaining, and acceptance, in a darkly comedic dialogue with Daniel. When he finally passes through the red doors, he finds a multi-layered hellscape that he must endure for eternity.
L-R: Arben Bajraktaraj as Daniel and Hugo Dillon as Nathan in PADEMONIUM. Photo courtesy of Arrow Video.
Quarxx sets the stage for his eerie tale with stunning yet chilling opening shots of a winding mountain road. The landscape is covered by a thick mist and a deathly stillness, complemented by a soft but foreboding score. There’s a slight hiccup in the flow and tone of the film when Nathan and Daniel begin their conversation, which starts out stiff, awkward, and unnatural. It’s almost like Quarxx is trying to stuff the dialogue with as much narrative information as possible, spoon-feeding the details to us rather than working them into the story more naturally. But then, as Nathan and Daniel’s dialogue settles into a rhythm, it emerges as a stylized philosophical commentary. The opening section of Pandemonium isn’t supposed to be realistic (after all, its two subjects are ghosts), but more of a hypothetical dialectic scenario. Nathan and Daniel are like symbolic characters in an ancient Greek myth, weighing out their eternal fates in painful detail. Quarxx layers in some subtle but effective dark humor, which complements the philosophical themes by making fun of human ego and pride. The stylized dialogue of the first section takes a minute to get used to, but it has an undeniable pull that sets Pandemonium up for success.
Ophélia Kolb as Julia in PANDEMONIUM. Photo courtesy of Arrow Video.
The film takes a turn when Nathan finally enters his designated door into hell. At this point, Pandemonium transitions into a sort of anthology horror movie — but an anthology with only two stories. On the other side of the red door, Nathan discovers a dry and desolate landscape littered with bodies. As Nathan approaches the first body in his path, that of a young girl, Pandemonium transitions into this girl’s backstory. A horrendous and demonic tale unfolds, presumably explaining how this innocent-looking child ended up on the bad side of the afterlife. Her story is followed by that of another soul from the underworld, a mother whose obliviousness and obsession with her career blinded her to her daughter’s mental struggles. These two backstories aren’t narratively connected to each other or to Nathan, and they don’t have much in common in terms of tone or style. The little girl’s story is a sickening fantasy gone wrong, while the mother’s tale is more subtle and rooted in the horrors of everyday life. As the title suggests, Pandemonium is kind of all over the place in terms of story and style. And yet, the two middle sections are so strong individually that perhaps if Quarxx had shortened the intro and included an additional middle section to round out the “anthology,” he may have been able to tie everything together.
L-R: Carl Laforêt as Tony and Manon Maindivide as Nina in PANDEMONIUM. Photo courtesy of Arrow Video.
Despite the fact that they aren’t obviously connected, these two mini stories are well-crafted and engaging, filled with stomach-churning visuals you won’t easily forget. The first section is vivid, outlandish, and grotesque. It’s a dark fantasy in the style of Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) and Tale of Tales (2015), but with less of a moral compass. This section is brought to life through the eyes of the young girl, Nina (Manon Maindivide), a demonic yet charismatic child who murders her own family and blames it on “Tony the Monster” (Carl Laforêt), the outcast man who lives under her family’s large mansion. Maindivide (Employee of the Month) is remarkable in the role of the murderous child, striking just the right balance between creepy and charming. The second story, which involves a fatally clueless mother named Julia (Ophélia Kolb), is less imaginative but just as dark. Overcome with grief and guilt after her daughter takes her own life, Julia slowly loses touch with reality. With cold, bleak imagery and a dedicated performance by Kolb (The Passengers of the Night), the penultimate section of Pandemonium is a heavy and terrifying cautionary tale. While these two stories don’t have much in common with each other or with Nathan’s storyline, they’re equally successful in evoking fear, dread, and terror.
Sidwell Weber as Chloé in PANDEMONIUM. Photo courtesy of Arrow Video.
Unfortunately, Pandemonium falls off the cliff in its final act, abandoning all the momentum and creativity of the middle section. The final scenes are a haphazard attempt to bring Nathan‘s story to an end, explaining what will happen to him in the next level of hell and beyond. While the middle sections illustrate two equally terrifying versions of “hell on earth,” the ending illustrates a more traditional version of hell, complete with orc-like horned monsters, a dark red color palette, and empty threats of an eternity of torment. Frankly, this trite vision of hell is nowhere near as terrifying as the middle two sections. The monsters of hell that await Nathan in the final stage of Pandemonium could easily be characters out of a movie like Hellboy (2004), and they’re a major disappointment after the artful visuals in the middle of the film. With little time to wrap up Nathan’s story, Quarxx shovels spoonfuls of over-explanatory dialogue into the characters’ mouths, telling the audience exactly how much pain Nathan is in for without really making us believe it.
Hugo Dillon as Nathan in PADEMONIUM. Photo courtesy of Arrow Video.
The ending of Pandemonium would have been the perfect place to tie everything together, or at least to reveal Nathan’s own backstory and shed light on why he’s been damned for all eternity. Without the context of Nathan’s backstory, it’s difficult to determine what Pandemonium is trying to say. Any good movie about the afterlife, religion, or spirituality should raise questions and prompt viewers to think critically, but Pandemonium raises questions because it’s confusing and incomplete, not because it’s thought-provoking. There are several great pieces that make up the puzzle that is Pandemonium, but in the end, they don’t quite fit together.
Available on VOD services like Amazon and iTunes, as well as streaming on Arrow Player May 27th, 2024.
Available on Blu-ray from Arrow Video May 28th, 2024.
For more information, head to the official Arrow Video Pandemonium webpage.
Final Score: 3 out of 5.
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Categories: Home Release, Home Video, Recommendation, Reviews, streaming
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