This is going to be a tough one for me to talk about. On the one hand, the original Hellraiser was an extremely formative film for me. Sitting in a free midnight screening in a mostly-empty theater, watching it play out on a big screen in the dark, it was the first time I think I ever watched any sort of film and got the feeling that all bets were off, that anything could happen. It almost felt…unsafe, and that stuck with me. It wouldn’t be the last time a film made me feel that way, but it was definitely the first. And a few years back, I waded into the nine extant films in the Hellraiser franchise (ugh), and barring some special effects that haven’t aged well, it still holds up surprisingly well.
But on the other hand, there’s the other eight films, and what I discovered re-watching the first four for the first time in years and watching numbers 5 through 9 for the first time is that not only would subsequent films fail to replicate what made the original so special, they’d decline in general quality really fucking fast. It was another example (alongside Nightmare On Elm Street) of the studio deciding to just start cranking out sequels while the property was still hot, without any regard for what made the original good or interesting. In the case of these films, the nadir was a slapdash stab at found-footage that was made - start to finish - in three weeks, purely to keep the studio’s license for the IP from lapsing. It was literally a film that wasn’t made to be viewed. It’s hard for me to think of a more cynical and calculated thing, and this is considering that every film in the series after the fourth was an unrelated screenplay that was retrofitted into a Hellraiser movie to varying degrees of success. They didn’t even bother to write them. Another one came out in 2018 to equally poor reception, but I was done.
So, Hellraiser (2022) simultaneously does and doesn’t have a lot to live up to. It has the shadow of the original hanging over it, but on the other hand the remaining films set the bar pretty low. And so my experience watching this film was a confusing one for me. It’s hard for me to tell how much I like it, or if I just appreciate it. And no, it’s not the revelatory experience the first one was for me. It doesn’t really do anything unexpected, and it does have problems, mostly in the third act. But it also does a lot of stuff right, and so it’s safe to say that even with its flaws, it’s miles better than any of the films that followed the original,
It opens on a gray day in Belgrade. There’s a man sitting on a bench with a satchel, and a woman approaches him. The whole thing feels like something out of a spy movie, in a good way. They’re there to make an exchange. She gives him a large sum of money, and he gives her a wooden box containing something that we don’t get to see. Cut to a large mansion in the Berkshires. There’s some kind of party going on, it’s all very stylish in a perfume commercial sort of way, and reminds me of nothing so much as a 1990s take on wealth and decadence. A fit young man sits nervously at the bar, and the woman from Belgrade sits next to him. She suggests that she can introduce him to the owner of the mansion and he jumps at the chance. The young man is Joey, and he’s being introduced to wealthy art collector Roland Voight. He’s ushered into a large room filled with small sculptures and art objects, and one of them is a small wooden puzzle box of intricate design. At Voight’s encouragement, Joey starts trying to solve the puzzle, and with a few twists and turns, it snaps into a new configuration, one that causes a blade to pierce Joey’s hand. Voight is unsurprised by this. The room starts spinning for Joey. Storm clouds gather, and then…something is in the room with them. Something with chains and hooks. Something to which Voight appeals. Something that takes Joey away.
Six years later, we meet Riley while she’s having noisy sex with her boyfriend Trevor…as it turns out, while her brother Matt, his boyfriend Colin, and their roommate Nora are in the other room making dinner. It’s a quick study - Riley’s a few months out of rehab, and given that she met Trevor in rehab, she’s kind of a mess. The dynamic between all of them is established pretty economically through how things are said as much as what is said - it’s a little exposition-heavy to start, but it rights itself. Riley’s underemployed, and is trying to figure out something better so she can get out of Matt’s apartment. Trevor starts to suggest something, but hesitates because she’s “trying to be good.” But when pushed, he reveals that at his job he made a lot of deliveries of “billionaire shit” to a warehouse out on the edges of the city, and after one last one, the orders just…stopped, and the warehouse seems to have been abandoned. But maybe there’s still some billionaire shit inside, and he remembers the keycode.
So they break into this warehouse and discover a single shipping container. Cutting the lock reveals a safe. Smashing the dial off the safe reveals a wooden case.
A wooden case with a familiar-looking puzzle box inside.
And so this is another way it’s in conversation with the original film. The original was very much about desire, and the price we’re willing to pay to satisfy our desires. And here there’s a definite narrative about needs and weaknesses and compulsions and hungers that runs through the whole film, along with the cost they exert on the individual and everyone around them. Riley has a self-destructive streak a mile wide, one that doesn’t manifest in melodramatic ways, as much as in consistently making the wrong decision, whatever form that takes. Whatever the safe, healthy thing to do is, she runs as far from that as she can. And Matt, time and time again, runs codependently after her, as compelled to try and fix her or rescue her as she is to destroy herself. So where the story of the decadent eager to seek newer and more exotic sensations drove the original film, here it’s more about someone on the ragged end of that, someone who’s become a prisoner to the things they sought. But the point is the same throughout - these needs…all of them… have a cost. And I’ll give the film credit for driving the action with human frailty to the degree that it does.
Elsewhere, it acknowledges the original film in tasteful, restrained ways - there are a number of visual and musical allusions throughout, more like it’s using the vocabulary of the first film than repeating scenes or anything obvious like that. It feels as much like an updating of what the first film did (and none of the subsequent films bothered to do) as anything else, nothing so blatant as stunt casting or fanservice, and what little bits of worldbuilding there are don’t distract from the story too much. There’s always the danger of spending more time on the mythology than the story or the people, and that doesn’t really happen here. If anything, it explores some of the ideas from the second film from a slightly different angle, in ways that are sometimes more successful, and in others less so, but never to the corny, sub-Freddy Kreuger depths of that film’s final act. In a lot of ways, it feels like what a sequel to the original film would have been with a bigger budget and a focus on making a good film instead of trying to crank something out as quickly as possible. To be fair, Hellraiser 2 had a really good second act, but that’s about it.
But as well-made as it is, it does feel like it’s missing something for me, and I can’t tell how much of it is how the film is made and how much of it is me bringing my own history to it. It has a couple of good, tense moments in the third act and a twist I didn’t see coming, but I’ve seen variations on this story, I know how the world of this film works and it never really stretches that or does much to upend it. It’s respectful to the original, and that’s good, but perhaps too respectful. I’m never really surprised or shown anything new, and though I suspect that someone who’s never seen the original film could be startled by this - it’s still got a vision unlike anything else in horror - it also doesn’t capture the grimy fervor of the original, that sense that you’re in the hands of someone who isn’t playing safe with their ideas. It gets very violent in places, though not often, so there’s still a punch to it when it happens and as much is accomplished through restraint as graphic depiction. But it’s all…maybe a little too clean, a little too polite, missing that sense of connection to hunger and desire that the original film has. It’s colder, more cerebral in ways, where the original had a kinky, transgressive heat to it. I do appreciate that the antagonists are as aloof as they originally were, and the updated designs work well in some places, less well in others. But the sense of menace is largely restored.
And there are narrative issues as well. The pacing lags at times, and the ending drags out a little too much, trying to tie up too many pieces all at once, slowing things down and reducing the tension, and the way it all resolves feels a little stock to me. There’s a coda that seems maybe a little obvious and sequel-baity, though it’s well-done for all of that. It’s certainly better than any of the increasingly misbegotten sequels that followed the original, and in its subject matter I feel like it’s a better take on what Hellraiser 2 was trying to do than what that film accomplished, but it’s not the original. You can only make a film like that once.
IMDB entry
Available on Hulu
No comments:
Post a Comment