Pandemonium

  Nathan (Hugo Dillon) comes to at the site of a horrific crash in a godforsaken (but very scenic!) stretch of mountain road. The car is crumpled against the rocky curb, a trail of automotive debris leading back to where he was lying in the asphalt.

 At first he marvels at his good luck, but Daniel (Arben Bajraktaraj), another man at the site, quickly corrects him: It turns out both of them died in the crash.

 What follows is a pretty basic black comedy where, after taking a lot of convincing, the two men get into a metaphysical discussion - one that's complicated when two doors pop up out of nowhere: one red and menacing, the other white and non-assuming. Daniel hears heavenly music (harps and trumpets, for fuck's sake!) from the white door, Nathan hears screams and chains wafting out from the other one.

 This leads to the two newlydeads to bicker about the nature of their sins. It ends with a pretty predictable but still funny twist, which unfortunately relies on a pretty hacky bit of misdirection.

 After some waffling Nathan ends up in a hell of the no-nonsense, medieval catholic variety - the type where even minor sins are punished forever. In the anteroom he finds a few corpses, and when he touches them he gets to see a little bit of their lives. Because... Surprise! This is somehow an anthology movie now.

 The first story is about Nina (Manon Maindivide), a little shit girl who lives in a huge manor house with her parents. An early development takes them out of the picture, something that doesn't seem to bother little Nina at all; She goes down into the catacombs to retrieve a huge, deformed man (Carl Laforêt), with whom she bickers while she decides what to do with her parents' corpses. It's a gothic, moody little piece, entertaining in its perversity, but aside from a sharp, nasty exclamation mark at the end it doesn't really go anywhere.

 Then it's Julia's (Ophélia Kolb) turn - a lone mother whose daughter has just committed suicide after being brutally bullied at school. Julia refuses to acknowledge her as dead, and tries to make amends for ignoring the warning signs by taking the corpse out for a holiday - one imagines the saddest possible version of Weekend at Bernie's would follow, but tragically the short ends well before they get to the beach.

 Those two digressions finished we come back to Nathan, who is led to his place of torment by a hellish bureaucrat. There are some developments, a couple of them agreeably bizarre, and it's all wrapped up with a pretty horrifying final shot.

 Those are some pretty decent parts. Unfortunately, they don't add up to much - it feels like mononymic writer/director Quarxx had a bunch of cool images and punchlines, but wasn't able to wrangle them in a satisfying fashion... so the result is a bunch of underdeveloped ideas, stories that lack resolution or proper development, and a structure that feels ill at ease with the anthology format.

 There's a lot going on with the script - the indelibility of sin and rigidity of its punishment, letter vs. spirit of the law, taking responsibility for one's actions... but there's no time to give any of these any sort of consideration, or even any weight.

 It's beautifully shot, though (cinematography by Didier Daubeach, Hugo Poisson and Colin Wandersman) - the first segment up in the mountains stands out as particularly good-looking, and the way a snowstorm slowly but surely turns the world white around the two ghosts - as if their world was already being erased - is a gorgeous bit of imagery, extremely well realised. The acting is good (Maindivide as the little psycho is a lot of fun to watch) and the orchestral soundtrack (by Benjamin Leray) is excellent.

 As good as some of the elements are, I found the whole pretty underwhelming. It feels like Quarxx might have a great movie in him, but sadly this is not it.