In short: Hellraiser (2022)

Sort-of clean addict’s Riley (Odessa A’zion) decision to follow the plan of her criminal non-mastermind boyfriend to steal something that will turn out to be the Lament Configuration (New Edition) leads to madness and death (mostly death, though) for everyone involved, including her half-estranged brother.

I was rather looking forward to David Bruckner’s version of Hellraiser, given how much I enjoyed – well, I say “enjoyed” but you know what I mean – his The Ritual and The Night House. Alas, the actual film leaves me completely cold. While there are some scenes that are memorable as high technical accomplishments on a design and effects level – just take that van sequence as an example – there’s an abstract, passionless and sexless quality to all of it that is completely at odds with the material and its thematic connotations. It’s a film about obsessions, sex, violence and all combinations thereof where nobody ever seems all that obsessed (even passionate) about anything; perversion’s a cenobite that looks a bit like it was made with the action figure foremost in mind. Bruckner’s usual thematic main concern – the combination of grief and guilt – does appear again, but in comparison with his earlier films, its treatment is so superficial it borders on the offensive.

But then, the character going through the grief is not really a character, but a flat cliché version of a young woman down on her luck, as lifeless at her core as the rest of the film. Turning the cenobites into aggressive tempter figures is not such a great idea either, bringing them much too close to the been there done that of the classic devil, taking away from the feeling of mystery and the uncanny. (And yes, I know, some of the Hellraiser comics did this as well, but those were mostly terrible, so don’t seem to be the greatest source to me).

There is simply no reason for this to be two hours long – the characters are certainly not complex enough to need scenes and scenes of build-up with them, and there’s simply not enough plot to fill the spaces between set pieces.