***/****
starring Hugo Dillon, Arben Bajraktaraj, Manon Maindivide, Ophelia Kolb
written and directed by Quarxx
by Walter Chaw French multidisciplinary artist Quarxx’s sophomore feature Pandemonium is relentless miserablism presented handsomely and with neither of the usual pressure valves of archness or irony. It’s punishing. Although it doesn’t share much in terms of approach or narrative with Park Chan-wook’s Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, they have a similarly slick surface, and it did make me feel uncomfortable in the same way. And, ultimately, almost as unhappy. Films like this–such as most of Lars von Trier’s and Michael Haneke’s respective filmographies–are generally provocations without much more on their mind than to upset expectation and a perceived general apathy, but Pandemonium did get me thinking about how I’m raising my kids, so there’s that at least. I wonder if the function of the film-as-endurance-test isn’t ultimately as a lens with which to focus one’s empathy. That is, to say that for as lousy as your life feels at any given moment, it can and almost certainly will get worse. How consistently I enjoy movies that make me feel awful (and now I’m thinking of Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor, which made me feel bad for months–and topped my best-of list of that year) says something about our desire for confirmation bias, I suppose. I want to be reassured that my Hobbesian outlook is rational. I’m addicted to that reassurance.
Pandemonium opens on a misty mountain pass, upon the scene of a terrible accident that has apparently claimed the lives of a motorist and the motorcyclist he’s tried unsuccessfully to avoid. Nathan (Hugo Dillon) and Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj) stand in the middle of the road, trying to remember how they got there and speculating about who might be in the wreckage if it isn’t them. It is them, of course, and in their freshly-minted afterlife, two gates appear: a white one and a red one; the heavenly kind and the road to perdition. After a brief debate, both attempt the white gate, are rebuffed, and resign themselves to Hell, where Nathan discovers, in a field of ash and corpses, that he can experience the acts of his fellow penitents if he puts his ear to them. So he does. He witnesses little Nina (Manon Maindivide) and her imaginary friend Tony (Carl Laforêt) doing indescribable things to Nina’s parents and little sister. Then he watches as overworked barrister Julia (Amy Ryan doppelgänger Ophélia Kolb) fails to notice how terribly her teen daughter Chloé (Sidwell Weber) is doing in her new school–though we are forced to–before it’s too late and she has to drag Chloé’s body out of a bathtub. Properly bolstered by an overload of Weltschmerz, Nathan proceeds to his damnation and, eventually, to his destiny as… Sufficed to say, Quarxx is less interested in cathartic epiphanies than in bludgeoning. There’s a point during Nina’s story where I worried he might show a little mercy–but no, just an oven used in a way that ovens were not intended to be used.
Pandemonium is bitter medicine delivered artfully–a draught of curative unpleasantness to place in harsh perspective exactly how cruel the universe can be, how overrun we are at all times by monsters, in fact and deed. Even the framing story of Nathan and Daniel’s fatal accident becomes, through the peeling away of layers, one of darkness, perhaps pedophilia, and a cosmic, binary injustice in which a mercy-killing is judged the same as a kidnapping/homicide–and suicide is seen as an equivalent sin to murdering your parents in their sleep. The picture reminds me most of the original Brothers Grimm fairytales in its refusal to compromise, as well as in how it frames whatever victories are won by its heroes as inevitably coming at the expense of other people. Here’s a dimension where Darwinism is the only law, and each of us is only here because a million generations before us have proven to be the best at killing and fucking. Its title refers to the place of demons in John Milton’s “Paradise Lost” and the etymology of “pandemonium” breaks down into words meaning “every” and “demon,” summoning images in my head of the Vanity Fair in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Guillermo del Toro’s Troll Bridge, where one vendor, without comment, is playing a musical instrument composed of a human corpse. We are less than playthings in this existence, less than a quintessence of dust. We are metaphors for fools and dreamers. Pandemonium isn’t for everyone–and I think it’s occasionally too cute en route to making its point–but it’s just the right temperature for me in 2023: freezing-cold and getting colder, with no hope of sunrise on any horizon.
