Pandemonium 
Written and directed by Quarxx
Starring Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Ophélia Kolb
Not rated
Runtime: 94 minutes
Streaming on Arrow and other VOD platforms May 27

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I want to be clear that whatever I say here, positive or negative, I do not think it is okay for a person to go by the mononym "Quarxx." That's what the writer-director of the new French horror film Pandemonium does.

The movie opens perfectly. Two men stand on an empty highway, amazed they've survived a horrible crash. One was on a bike, one was in a car, and though their vehicles are totaled a few feet away, the men themselves are miraculously unscratched. And then they realize one of them is simultaneously standing outside the car, fine, and trapped inside it, bloody and broken. They're just spirits, realizing they're dead and in the afterlife.

Doesn't "French hell" sound particularly horrible? As bad as "American hell" would seem to be, and it's possible we're already living in it, "French hell" sounds especially dire, though maybe I'm basing that on the New French Extremity movies I have, unfortunately, seen. Pandemonium is more subtle than those films from the jump-- by not showing us the crash, Quarxx successfully lulled me into the feeling that I was watching something closer to an arthouse film than the horror anthology that ended up proceeding. The first half hour of the movie looks like the TV show Les Revenants with its rural road caked in dense fog. Like that show, Pandemoniumgets far on mood alone before revealing more straightforward terror.

The newly-deceased men realize they're standing near large doors that appear to lead nowhere but may serve as portals to heaven and hell. There's one more brutal twist and then they do what any of us would when suddenly faced with our own shocking, violent deaths: they continue to bicker. As their story peters out, we shift to a new place and a new perspective.

Quarxx (typing that name out does not get easier) has said the shifts in perspective are supposed to demonstrate one character's descent through different circles of hell, which would make sense if the opening segment wasn't followed by two stories. It's an abbreviated hell, a hell limited by budget and the generally agreed upon idea that a full-length horror movie should be about 90 minutes long.

I think the film's three segments are each well made, but any overarching narrative feels created after the fact. You wonder if this would have all felt a little more coherent if Pandemonium was presented as a one-director anthology of discrete shorts instead of a feature with interlocking parts. The idea that there's a connection between these different parts ends up making the whole feel more fragmented, as bizarre as that sounds. You can think of Pandemonium however you want, but you may get a headache if you try to draw a straight line between any two scenes.

Other aspects of the film can get overbearing. The soundtrack, for its part, seems to be at least 80% "bwAAAAAAAAM" noises. And while I said the horror gets more straightforward as the movie goes, it also flies off into wild abstraction a few times. In the film's second segment, a little girl kills her parents to appease a disabled man living in her basement, and the segment is as linear as that description might make it sound until the girl and the man star in a sadistic stage play. That's our Quarxx!

The technical aspects of the film stay strong and the acting is always good, but when the tone swings as wildly as it does, you wish there had been more care in how they were presented. They don't make much of a whole. This could have been the best short film of the year if it'd existed entirely as its framing device. Not that that means a whole lot now.

Maybe that's a hidden perk of streaming, a boon that can help make up for the smaller screen and the ambient distractions of home: You can watch Pandemonium however you want. You can watch the opening half hour and then turn your TV off and play with your dog for the next sixty minutes. You don't have to see the scene where the main character meets a Spirit Halloween store Satan who speaks in stilted Hellraiser cliches ("Humanity is evil by nature and must atone for its sins"). It's easy to say "There's a better movie in there" after watching something pretty good that doesn't quite live up to its early potential. But it's streaming and Pandemoniumtakes enough sharp turns that you'll know when one story has ended and the next has begun-- you can turn this thing off whenever.

Making thirty great minutes is no small feat! Just know that you can check out when those minutes are over. Or you could do something truly berserk: You could watch a feature-length movie by a guy named Quarxx.