The French film, Pandemonium, which screened at the Screamfest horror film festival, is a welcome twist on the horror genre. It deals with death and dead bodies, but in a surreal, philosophical way.
The film follows Nathan (Hugo Dillon) and Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj), who awaken on the road beside a collision between Nathan's car and Daniel's motorcycle. They soon realize they've actually died in the crash.
Two doors appear before them, one red and one white. Nathan and Daniel assume these are doors to heaven and hell and debate their respective qualifications for entering the white door.
The doors prove to be not so simple. While they debate the sins of their lives, they observe passersby at the accident scene.
Nathan even appears seamlessly in the same frame as his dead body, which could either be a simple split screen effect or complicated digital composite. Or perhaps Dillon has an identical twin, but the effect of him observing his own dead body is striking.
Nathan and Daniel's scene occurs on a foggy mountain road, which is impressive, as it's a real location in which the metaphysical story can unfold. The snow must have been a fortunate natural occurrence because the production could not have pumped fake snow on the entire mountainside road.
Nathan and Daniel's story takes up about one-third of the film. Pandemonium then follows a young girl's (Manon Maindivide) surreal experience in a purgatory version of her original life.
This culminates in a bloody scene with a creature, thus qualifying Pandemonium for Screamfest. However, just dealing with death and dying already qualified it.
The third sequence focuses on the mother (Ophelia Kolb) of a troubled teenager (Sidwell Weber). The film does circle back to Nathan's story, giving it conclusive judgment.
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Pandemonium offers three ways to explore and deal with death -- a subject that will face every viewer eventually. Traversing the extremes from subtlety to graphic creatures with whom the deceased interact, Pandemonium is a unique philosophical film.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.