The kind of drama suggested by such a bombastic title is scrupulously avoided in Hellhole, from Belgian director Bas Devos. Even the reference to then-candidate Donald Trump's use of the word to describe the city of Brussels, through which the film prowls, has been replaced by so much Trumpian bluster, as non-Belgians may have a hard time establishing the Connection. And the connection itself is vaguely confusing, for while Devos' love for his city throbs beneath the Teflon camerawork, the sadness of his portrayal of a sleepwalking citizenry still reeling from the 2016 Brussels terror attacks it undermines any possible irony. This may not be a vision of hell, but it sure feels like purgatory.
Wannes (Will Thomas) is a doctor who seems shadowed by death even in his off hours, spending afternoons with his sister watching over a dying relative or Skyped with his son, a fighter pilot on a tour of the Orient. . Medium. Mehdi (a soulful Hamza Belarbi) is a young Belgian of Algerian descent afflicted with blinding headaches, and Alba (Alba Rohrwacher) is a lonely translator in the European Parliament who seeks oblivion through nightclubs and casual sex, but can be developing narcolepsy.
Director: Bartosz M. Kowalski
Writers: Bartosz M. Kowalski, Mirella Zaradkiewicz
Stars: Piotr Zurawski, Olaf Lubaszenko, Sebastian Stankiewicz
Just as important as people are the spaces in which they are photographed, in "I, Tonya" cinematographer Nicolas Karakatsanis's sublimely silky camerawork, they are given ample time to slip around corners or wriggle deviously further. . beyond the windows by editor Dieter Diependaele's calm cut. swing. So, while story bits occasionally come together for each of the three characters (Wannes goes on a date, Mehdi's older brother asks her to steal from their father, Alba gets suspended for falling asleep on the job), these narrative threads seem almost incidental, as though the snaking camera has just traversed them and they remain largely unresolved.
The impression we get instead is that of a distant, drone-like intelligence embodied in the camera's coolly appraising gaze, which finds as much interest in the seams of the city's concrete facades or the carpentry of its bricks as it does in fissures of personalities if its traumatized inhabitants. The point is superlatively well made: one transcendent shot in particular seems to brush against a higher truth by completing a slow and perfectly alien 360-degree loop of a house in which two living characters react to the death of a third, but the evocation masterful dissociation inevitably leads to a dissociative experience.
Part of Devos' schedule, with his second feature after the well-received "Violet" (also dealing with grief and loss but on a more intimate scale), he seems to be creating a sense of absence. It is as if the attacks ripped apart the city's metaphysical infrastructure, wiping away lives, security and perhaps a more innocent conception of Brussels as a place where such a thing could never happen. Oddly enough, the times this is best accomplished may be during the title sequences. At the beginning, the word "Hellhole" appears without the "o" and at the end, the cast and crew names are rendered as two massive blocks of text, marked with smudges where their credited role fades later. It evokes the roll of names in a monument to the fallen and reminds us, with those empty graphics, of the disappeared.
But elsewhere, it is the very control and intellectualized elegance of the aesthetic that works against such resonance. It's hard to feel a sense of loss here, hard to feel anything at all, when the making of the film is so complete. A quirky coda reinforces the glassy removal: In another otherworldly 360-degree shot, we circle a fighter jet idling in a hangar.
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