In the Flesh: Hellraiser (2022)

“Mr. Voight never does anything he can get someone else to do for him,” says Serena Menaker (Hiam Abbas), chief counsel and procurer for reclusive billionaire Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić). Of the thematic threads David Bruckner’s Hellraiser pursues, which range from addiction to living with grief, it’s this simple thesis on the nature of the rich that cuts deepest. They eat, and someone else picks up the check. Višnjić has a delightful face, full of mischief and character, and if the part is a little underwritten he’s more than able to pick up the slack. Odessa A’zion is magnetic as Riley, a recovering addict who loses her brother to the monstrous puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration and Jamie Clayton proves a formidable Pinhead, sibilant and subtly expressive, but the supporting cast is somewhat underbaked. It’s not a fatal flaw for a slasher, but the extent to which the movie might have been richer and more emotionally engaging had it sharpened those secondary players is plainly evident.

Digital matte paintings, thoughtful shot compositions, and robust makeup and other practical effects give Hellraiser something of a throwback feel. There’s a partial degloving by piano wire that’s so believably gruesome it feels straight out of an 80s Carpenter flick. A few images don’t quite land, but the ambition behind things like achieving walls separating and corridors lengthening with mechanical effects rather than digital is frankly jaw-dropping. The scene in which Norah (Aoife Hinds) is sucked into the realm of Leviathan straight out of the back of a van, which opens up around her like a gigantic incarnation of the famous puzzle box, is enough to sell a much, much weaker movie than Bruckner’s, and it’s not even the main course here. We have the second movie’s endless labyrinth of Escher-esque staircases, astounding hydraulics, a man staggering around with some kind of demonic harpsichord rammed right through his chest, and the Lament Configuration itself morphing and twisting with malevolent playfulness.

Ben Lovett’s score borrows heavily from the soundtrack to Barker’s original film, though his attempts to interject more modern Hans Zimmer-esque percussion into an otherwise string-driven and almost fairytale-like musical landscape meet with mixed success. Even as the movie starts to flag going into its final ten or fifteen minutes, these sensual pleasures are more than enough to keep things interesting, and even when the movie cribs from the original you get little gems like Clayton’s absolutely filthy delivery of the line “explorers in the outer reaches… of sensation’s rim.” There’s a solid amount of onscreen sex as well, bracing in a century marked so far by the rapid vanishing of sex from cinema, and it’s hot and genuinely intimate to boot. Bruckner uses lingering close-ups and long, patient medium shots to balance the interplay between inner experience and outer spectacle. It’s that kind of talented and careful journeyman work that makes Hellraiser more than the sum of its parts.