With increasing internet buzz around this Polish horror-thriller, the film starts like The Omen with a desperate priest failing to execute a 'marked' baby, which then jumps forward thirty years as a young priest arrives at a forbidding and austere monastery/sanatorium. The start of the film is suitably gloomy and atmospheric, and before long exorcism tropes duly kick in (a seemingly possessed young woman tied to a bed, crucifixes start shaking) but - as our protagonist and the viewers slowly discover - all is not quite as it seems. The reveals are paced out nicely and misdirections are used well to keep the audience interested. Events turn much more unpleasant from around the half-way mark, and the bonkers finale has some arresting imagery that is well-realised on screen. The film is beautifully designed and shot in a constant blue/candlelight half-light with expansive use of sound. It feels a little episodic overall and the ending is sudden but suggestively open-ended, but Hellhole is an odd, striking and reasonably satisfying horror.
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