THE DEED TO HELL (Glenn Andreiev, 2008)

One of the greatest literary works, Dante’s The Divine Comedy, makes its way to Paradise from the circular bowels of Hell. In independent U.S. writer-director-editor Glenn Andreiev’s terrific The Deed to Hell, all roads lead to Hell. This may be Andreiev’s funniest film, a satire of our foibles, legally, socially, familially, but once it enters Hell there is nothing at all to laugh at; its gory, sorrowful vision of torment, perpetual torture and dwindling hope for redemption, a “second chance,” is accompanied by scripted captions presumably issuing from a punishing cosmic entity or force direly communicating with miscreants. Of course, it is Andreiev’s own moral outrage that is targeting a tangle of individuals some of whose sins may reflect some of our individual own. We are not visiting a Hell along the stylish lines that Woody Allen concocted for his fine Deconstructing Harry (1997). Andreiev’s Hell is for real and only very rarely escapable. In one instance, Andreiev stings us with a variation on those who, “dead,” are medically revived and report having glimpsed a warm, radiant, family-friendly Afterlife. Here it is Hell that is glimpsed—and it is a dark, desolate, horrific place somewhat reminiscent of Hans W. Geissendörfer’s vision of Nazism in his Dracula film, Jonathan (1970).
     Andreiev himself plays one of the sinners, Sal, who backstabs his partner in theft, Andy, by shooting him and absconding with their ill-gotten gains. Before Sal flees for European capitals he commits an atrocity of the order of Scar’s casual killing of a dog in John Ford’s The Searchers (1956): he deposits his cat, in a ventilated carrier, into a dumpster, abandoning him. Andreiev recruited his own beloved pet, Boris, for the role; it is a relatively small act, perhaps, given the order of crimes and betrayals that the film catalogues, but for pet-owners it will be a haunting one; and there’s something unspeakably, if humorously, obscene in the discrepancy between the natty pet carrier and the cat’s ignominious fate.
     The film’s adventure begins in Brooklyn, New York, before taking off for Europe. Hell appears to be the flip side of reality, a surreal dimension that unites Earthly geographical points and, in a reversal of expectation, shows more specific evidence of time and time’s passage than there is in the normal world above, where past and present are often indistinguishable. Hell exists at the crossroads of interior guilt and shame and something metaphysical and absolute. The punishments we see enacted are enormously painful to contemplate. In other words, Andreiev’s film is so gripping it gets inside our head.