(Just as a heads-up, I’m probably going to end up spoiling most of this one, but in a way it doesn’t really matter, because it’s nothing you won’t already see coming. This is in no way a subtle or surprising film.)
A good title can sell me on a movie. I’m a sucker for cryptic, oblique, understated titles (e.g., Hereditary, The Blair Witch Project) but every now and then there will be one that just begs viewing if only to find out what the hell it’s all about (e.g., The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Beyond The Black Rainbow). I think the problem, for me, is the ones that sort of fall in between, where they’re just sort of generically descriptive. Those don’t really spark the imagination, so it’s hard to imagine that the film will either.
This is one of many problems with Hellhole. It’s a film that is as dull, formulaic and obvious as its title would lead you to believe.
The film opens in Poland, in 1957. It is a dark and stormy night, and a car pulls up to a church, and a priest gets out, carrying an infant in his arms as he heads inside. He brings the child up to the altar, and proceeds to ask God for forgiveness as he pulls out a dagger. He’s going to kill the child, who has a strange birthmark on its shoulder. The police burst in and tell him to put the knife down. He tells them that they don’t understand, that this “evil seed” must be destroyed, and they gun him down for his trouble. If you’re wondering where you’ve seen this before, it was the end of The Omen, in 1976.
Flash forward thirty years, and a priest named Father Marek arrives at a monastery located way out in the sticks. They’ve largely been forgotten, or left alone, because they make a point of running a sanatorium for people who suffer from demonic possession, exorcising their demons and caring for them as they recover. As the prior sees it, it’s a necessary service that nobody wants to admit to. Father Marek is given a habit, a rosary (he brought his own), and his suitcase is searched. It’s very important, given their line of work, that earthly temptations are kept far away. His cigarettes and cell phone are confiscated. The evening meal is some kind of foul-looking gruel, dark and pasty, with…chunks…in it. Not that you expect ascetics to eat well, but this is especially unappealing.
After dinner, once he’s returned to his cell, Father Marek opens a hidden compartment in his suitcase. There’s a gun and a flashlight, and some news clippings about a series of mysterious disappearances in the area. The monks may have something to hide.
It’s oddly devoid of tension, even in moments where there should be tension. Marek witnesses an exorcism that proceeds almost by rote - a young woman is bound to a bed, there’s prayer, she rears up and starts growling and convulsing, the bed starts shaking, and the prior’s crucifix bursts into flames. At no point does anyone evince anything stronger than mild concern. Most of them seem almost bored, and it certainly doesn’t look any different from any other exorcism you’ve ever seen in a movie before. The dialogue is serviceable (though the translation does make everything sort of an understatement) as are the performances and the soundtrack. Nothing special, but nothing awful. Just sort of there. It’s just as rote in its action - Marek goes poking around where he shouldn’t be, not everything is what it seems, something spooky happens, rinse, repeat. And if that isn’t clear enough, the first act ends with a conversation (held in a confessional, because of course it is) that spells out what anyone actually watching the film has already figured out. No, Marek isn’t really a priest, he’s an undercover cop investigating the disappearances, which appear to be tied to the exorcisms they perform - exorcisms that the possessed inevitably don’t survive. Yes, of course they figure this out, and yes, the revelations you expect to follow - about Marek, about the monks, about what they’re really up to - they’re exactly what you’re anticipating them to be. There’s more to Marek than meets the eye (like the weird birthmark on his shoulder), it’s not by chance that he was assigned this case, and so on.
Normally I don’t like spoiling films that I’m writing about. Whether I liked it or not, someone should be able to watch it and decide for themselves, but this film is so predictable that anyone with any familiarity with the genre will, like I did, see every single beat coming. Until the very end, wherever you think the story’s going to go, that’s where it goes. There IS sort of a twist in the third act, and in theory it’s one for which I have sort of a perverse appreciation, but it’s handled so anticlimactically, it lands with such a thud that it’s actually more comic than anything else. In that moment, it almost felt like the film was shifting course to become a spoof of the sort of film it had been sincerely up to that point. Which is certainly a choice, though I can’t say it’s a good one.
And then THAT twist is reversed, but the filmmakers don’t bother to offer any narrative logic for it, almost like they realized that otherwise the film won’t have an ending, just a bunch of monks standing around saying “welp,” so nope, that didn’t count. I do have to give the film credit for not copping out on its ending (which contains the only interesting imagery in the entire film), but it’s far too little, far too late. The climax takes place in a cave under the monastery, around a well that is a portal to hell. A literal hellhole. It is a hole...to hell. This is what we have to work with here.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
Similar ending as in Cabin in the woods. The same good, unpredictable logic.
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