In short: Hellhole (2022)

Original title: Ostatnia wieczerza

Warning: given the twist-heavy plot of the movie, I’ll have to spoil at least a couple of them!

Poland, 1987. A priest named Marek (Piotr Zurawski) joins a Gothically creepy looking monastery clearly far away from the next city to help out in the place’s main business. Officially, the place is a sanatorium for the mentally ill, but in truth, the monks there are specialized in exorcisms, and everyone inside not wearing a cassock is possessed.

Apart from this open secret, the place has quite a few rather more hidden ones, and our protagonist clearly feels very uncomfortable there very soon. Of course, he has some secrets of his own, for in truth, he’s not a priest but a cop and has come to the monastery undercover, looking for a number of women who have disappeared in the area. If you believe a number of anonymous letters, the monks have something to do with these disappearances. Marek’s first discovery is, however, something else: the monks are only faking the exorcisms with the help of drugs and technology. Which certainly isn’t going to be the last surprise he’ll have; things are going to get a bit more personal.

Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Netflix movie Hellhole hasn’t exactly been a hit when it comes to its critical reception. That’s not a complete surprise, really, for after a fast and furious beginning – the exorcism is pretty spectacular – the film quickly settles into a groove of slow mood building, and not much else. Because characterisation is mostly perfunctory, there’s at first not terribly much to hold onto as a viewer apart from the fine monastery set and the thick mood of creepy Christianity. The audience, like the protagonist, is slowly fed a series of curious, inexplicable things to chew on without much explanation; the film asks for quite a bit of patience, perhaps too much for many a viewer.

However, all of the seemingly random elements actually do belong together, and the final act turns into a series of increasingly bizarre and wonderfully macabre twists that may be preposterous, yet also compelling, fun and more than just a bit bonkers. I found myself having a huge amount of fun with these revelations, as well as the film’s increasingly sardonic sense of humour – there’s a bit connected with a somewhat disappointing ceremony that’s absolutely perfect. Then the final five minutes happened, and I found myself absolutely in love with the visual language used as well as Kowalski’s willingness to just go there.

Which certainly doesn’t make Hellhole a perfect movie, but if you bring a bit of patience with you, it may very well reward you with blowing your mind just a little bit in the end.

In short: Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight (2020)

Original title: W lesie dzis nie zasnie nikt

It’s time for another round in the eternal fight between teenagers and cellar dwelling backwoods mutants. In Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Polish version of the tale, the teens are part of a techno-addict offline hiking camp, an idea the film doesn’t use for anything but to explain the absence of cell phones, though why someone leading a three day hike with a group of teens wouldn’t still have some way to contact the outside world is kept unexplained. The mutants are huge, and icky, smell bad and have just escaped their mum’s cellar. A bit of the old ultra-violence, Polish style, ensues.

While it’s more a competently made horror film than a deeply exciting one, Nobody Sleeps is at the very least entertaining throughout. It’s decently paced and effectively written, which is quite a bit more than most filmmakers believe they can get away with when making another backwoods slasher.

But then, there are a couple of elements here not completely typical for this sub-genre. Kowalski is pretty good at shifting the film’s tone repeatedly, and uses this to go from satire on the state of Poland (he doesn’t seem impressed), to bread and butter backwoods slasher stuff, to that very peculiar style of dark humour you often encounter in Polish films, and back again.

The film also has the interesting habit of dragging its teen characters back from being one note slasher movie clichés a scene or two before it kills them off, providing the young actors with a little bit to get their teeth in, and giving the curious impression of actually liking its characters (not a thing slashers do very often) yet still showing no compunction against getting rid of them with a nasty gore gag or two.

It’s certainly a mixture that does keep a viewer on their toes.