PANDEMONIUM

AVEC LES SPOILIERES

The first 25 minutes of this French afterlife horror are brilliant: a dialogue on a snowy mountain road between Nathan and Daniel: two men realising they've both been killed in a car accident and that they're suddenly ghosts. What to do now? Are they stuck at the crash site for eternity? Or will they be guided into an afterlife? Heaven or Hell? What a crying shame that Pandemonium immediately nosedives into two thoroughly uninteresting stories of death, a surprise nod to Lucio Fulci and a genuinely bleak view of what comes post-bucket kicking.

While Daniel walks reluctantly through the (definitely not pearly) gateway and is never seen again, Nathan follows and finds himself in the last scene of The Beyond: a desolate corpse-strewn wasteland. And he discovers he can experience the crimes and cruelties that led those people there. One is a child who murdered her family, one is a woman who ignored her daughter's schoolyard persecutions. And then he finds the true meaning of hell and the punishment for his own crimes...

It's not as if either of the two illustrative stories had some kind of ghoulish twist in the tale a la Creepshow. You just watch these extended vignettes thinking there must be more to them that this - but there isn't. But it's not as if either of them had any bearing on Nathan's own story or there are any lessons to be learned because the film's own take on the afterlife is eternal suffering and despair regardless of earthly conduct (even though that explicitly doesn't happen at the start, although this is Hell and the demons might be lying), which makes no sense at all. And the final coda is completely out of nowhere and makes even less sense.

Some would argue that ghost stories are optimistic: they suggest life after death, that (as Stanley Kubrick said) oblivion is not the end. This depiction of What Happens Next emphatically is not optimistic: eternal, meaningless punishment without purpose or reason. Thanks for sharing your vision, Quarxx (whose real name is the far more normal Alexandre Claudin, apparently). Sadly, the intriguing promise of the first half hour is completely lost and the result is a film which got steadily more annoyed and irritated with, to the extent that I only just managed to resist the temptation to switch it off.

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