[Screamfest 2023 Review] PANDEMONIUM - Nightmarish Conjurings

PANDEMONIUM is a French film written and directed by the multimedia artist Quarxx. It is one of those movies that brings up more questions than it answers. It is a horror of a most peculiar sort with touchingly polite monsters and human beings who are more dangerous than any of the monsters or demons are.

The synopsis of the film gives the bare bones of the story and states, “Following a car accident, Nathan realizes he is dead. He will discover Hell and encounter the sufferings of the tormented souls that he will meet there. Will he be able to escape?”

PANDEMONIUM stars Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide, Ophélia Kolb, Sidwell Weber, and Carl Laforêt. The actors are all very watchable and doing good work, and it should be called out that one of them, Manon Maindivide, is a young child who shoulders the work of a longish section of the film and is called upon to play a character that most child actors never will be. She is excellent in the role of a murderous child who seems to have no scruples or conscience but still remains the center of the action.

Hugo Dillon is also good work and is the film’s narrative center for most of the running time. His Nathan is confused and disheartened with a face full of sadness and disappointment, who nonetheless never quite wants to take responsibility for his actions. The narrative is a bit like an anthology film without the formal structure that many anthologies have. Usually, you find a frame story that sets up the idea and themes of the anthology, that has a starting point and an ending point. As with the latest entry in the V/H/S franchise, V/H/S 85, Quarxx is playing with the basic idea of the anthology and using it in different ways. There’s no hard stop or start to the different stories.

Nathan does indeed wake up in a gorgeous, if cruel-looking, scene on a mountain road with Arben Bajraktaraj’s Daniel as his poor substitute for solace. The setup is a lot like life itself. You are plopped into a situation, and as the story progresses, you have very little information and almost no idea what is happening around you and what you should actually do. The anthology aspect comes into play after Nathan and Daniel finally move through the open doorway into the afterworld, past the scene of their deaths, and unfortunately, it’s not Heaven for them.

The film’s spotlight stays on Nathan as he comes to what looks like a cold and ashy place. Is it Hell, or is it Purgatory? The filmmaker leaves that up to you, but as Nathan examines some of the bodies lying in this dimension, the corpses’ stories flow into Nathan’s mind and onto the screen.

PANDEMONIUM seems to be an examination of the good and evil within human beings in the context of punishment in the afterlife. You see evil people casually committing horrific acts, and the suffering of the innocent and the punishment dealt out in the afterlife doesn’t seem to be fair, just like the punishment that life has to dole out to everyone. In my interpretation of PANDEMONIUM’s story and central theme, I see the Universe as a bureaucracy that is set in motion but that has no one guiding it. There’s a feeling of the film’s world and the portrayal of the afterlife is an empty graveyard and a place of continual torment. It hardly matters if you’ve done wrong or lived your life piously; the end result is the same.

However, within the characters, as horrifying as some of them are, there are moments of humanity and kindness even inside of some of the worst examples of human character. It’s a bit of a character study, too, in that respect, a non-judgmental one that seeks more to explore the story and continue the themes of despair and echoing eternity.

PANDEMONIUM is a puzzler that is going to require some commitment; the structure and the characters are very interesting but are out of the norm, so it forces the viewer to pay attention. The normal guardrails of structure aren’t there, and the long-ish stories don’t end or start in a conventional way. PANDEMONIUM is never going to tell you, “Okay, it’s time for the next segment,” it will simply continue and expect you to keep up.

PANDEMONIUM is an intentionally frustrating meditation on human character and suffering that asks more of its audience than your average horror or anthology film. It echoes of Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond, specifically the sequence set in the afterlife, and refuses to explain itself.

But for the patient viewer, PANDEMONIUM yields complex and heartbreaking characterizations that muse upon our lot in life and a potential afterlife. Is life fair? No, and neither is the afterlife, answers Quarxx and his film. Is it scary? Yes, for people who find other human beings puzzling and scary and in a realistic way despite the film’s supernatural trappings.

PANDEMONIUM had its US Premiere at the 2023 Screamfest festival.

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Dolores Quintana

Dolores Quintana is an actor and writer living in Los Angeles. She has written for blogs as diverse as Buddyhead, Pocho.com, and The Theatre @ Boston Court. She works as an actor in independent film and both immersive and traditional theatre with Alone: an Existential Haunting, Screenshot Productions, and Native Voices at The Autry.

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