There’s nothing more galling in life than a dwindling promise, and sadly, that is a real problem for Pandemonium (2023). What begins as a rather beautiful, stark and savage riff on what happens to us after we die disintegrates into a mess of clumsily-stitched parts, united for the most part only by two ideas: death is cruel, and so are families. As much as Pandemonium boasts intense sound design, some initially stunning visuals and a decent opening idea, its rapidly meandering focus cancels them out, leaving us with a tonally odd hodgepodge which just doesn’t work.
We start out with a man called Nathan (Hugo Dillon) who awakes, disorientated, on a remote mountain road. His first thoughts are, ‘I made it,’ and ‘I’m not hurt,’ which you can quickly guess are just wishful thinking; once he stands up and sees the nearby wreck of his car, we are perhaps privy to something he has yet to accept. But for exposition’s sake, he is helped to accept it by the presence of another man, Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj). Daniel has worked it out: they are dead. He was on his motorbike, Nathan was in his car and they fatally collided.
Nathan’s distress is genuinely painful to watch as he is gradually convinced of what’s happened to him. Both men grieve for their lives, but for the moment they’re unable to move. No one has come for them; no one is there to guide them. Rather like the death which occurs in the wonderful A Ghost Story (2017), they seem doomed to remain in one place – in their case, where they passed away. However, Daniel hears something, and then he sees something. Two sets of doors appear on the now impassably snowy road and, if it seems that Nathan’s past actions preclude him from following Daniel through one of the doors, then it ain’t so simple for Daniel, either. No one is getting off lightly here. If it seems, for a moment, like it’s all about to turn into a version of the idea that ‘good guys go to heaven’, then the film at least spares us that.
However, Pandemonium next opts to park this sequence, and in so doing, dispenses with the most successful part of its storyline. It broadens its scope, beginning to take in other scenarios, characters and settings. It slowly transpires that this is actually an anthology film: that could have all been fine, with a genuinely solid overarching narrative. Instead, the icy horror of the opening twenty minutes or so is first replaced with an odd, Gothic storyline about a disturbed little girl in a chateau, a blend of My Pet Monster and something altogether bleaker. Then there’s another, more worldly chapter which, again, has little to do with the two previous ones, other than how it takes death for a theme. This is horror cinema, folks, or at least it’s horror-adjacent: we’re already wall-to-wall with scintillating stories about death in horror, and audiences generally require more convincing than this. Even the presence of a clear nod to Fulci’s The Beyond (1981) – if openly lifting a scene constitutes a ‘clear nod’ – can’t cut it on its own. The nagging suspicion here is that these segments were never scripted at the same time, and have found themselves cut and shut together for reasons of expedience, rather than coherence.
At its best, Pandemonium‘s simple symbolism, stark scenery and the effective performances from Bajraktaraj and Dillon are very appealing, whilst its booming, sturm and drang music (together with a well-realised soundscape more generally) make this, initially, an engaging, sensory experience. There are some interesting ideas too: for instance, around the seeming corporeality of the newly dead: can Daniel really heave a corpse from one place to another? Or is this part of the fantasy? However, after experiencing this feeling of total engagement, the next phase feels like falling out of love: you remember what appealed to you in the first place, so you try to maintain interest, but as time passes – though you can’t pinpoint the exact moment – you find yourself moving through uncertainty and boredom to a final feeling of rather shameful hostility. There are just no convincing links between these tales; each tale feels reticent about any kind of closure or cogency. Fantasy shouldn’t mean that all narrative expectations go out of the window, after all, if you have clearly elected to start using those narrative elements. And then, when we get Dillon back again, he’s being made to guest star in an episode of Buffy.
It’s genuinely very difficult to account for what happens to this film during its runtime, and whilst there are technical aspects to applaud, it takes more than effective cinematography to make a film.
Pandemonium (2023) launches on Arrow’s streaming service in May 2024.