ANGEL HEART - ASCENSORE PER L'INFERNO

"Harry Angel" (Mickey O'Rourke) lives a pretty hand-to-mouth existence as a New York PI when he is hired to track down a musician named "Johnny Favorite". Now this fella really doesn't want to be found, and after a while our street-smart investigator begins to contemplate that maybe this search isn't really all that his employer "Louis Cyphre" (a Rasputin-esque Robert De Niro) has in mind. As the search becomes more intricate, "Angel" finds himself having doors slammed in his face, or even worse before he is immersed in a world of voodoo in a distinctly unwelcoming New Orleans. Corpses are starting to pile up and "Angel" is starting to get cold feet. Can he stay the course and discover the whereabouts of his quarry? Can he also discover quite why the enigmatic "Cyphre" wanted him on the case in the first place? This is one of those whodunit's where the quest itself is not one of the more riveting parts of the plot. "Angel" has an ability to turn almost everyone he sees into metaphorical stone - including Charlotte Rampling's rather mysterious "Margaret" - what's going on? Alan Parker keeps the Hjortsberg story moving along quite faithfully to the book, allowing us to gradually get a sense that all is not as it seems, that poor old "Angel" is being manipulated and that things are probably not going to end well for him! O'Rourke carries that off really well - he injects a swarthiness and grit to his character who clearly isn't quite as hard as he would like people to think, and De Niro - though infrequently on screen - also manages to create that slight sense of malevolence as the penny begins to drop for all watching. It's a bit slow out of the gate, but it does build well to a denouement that is amongst the best in this extensive genre.

Angel Heart spends most of its running time pretending to be a detective story in which Harry Angel is following a trail into somebody else’s darkness. Its best trick is that the trail is his.

Alan Parker shoots that investigation like a noir already half swallowed by something older. Rooms are all long shadows and backlight; New Orleans sometimes looks almost monochrome, until a little blue exhaust smoke gives the game away. The jazz and blues soundtrack keeps things grounded in gumshoe territory while religion, ritual, pentagrams, tarot and voodoo keep leaking in around the edges. Even Robert De Niro’s Louis Cyphre barely needs to do anything more threatening than peel an egg and maintain an increasingly magnificent set of fingernails.

What makes the film particularly interesting to us is how close it comes to an inverted folk-horror structure. Angel enters communities he does not understand, pushes into their beliefs and private spaces, and assumes he is the investigator. But he is not the endangered outsider. He is the contamination. The people around him have rather more reason to fear his arrival than he has to fear them.

That idea is stronger than the film’s use of the community itself. The voodoo material is atmospheric and suggestive, but too often feels like something Angel passes through rather than a system of belief actively pushing back against him. Characters who ought to recognise the danger in him rarely behave as though they do. A stronger sense of that shared knowledge could have turned the New Orleans sections from eerie decoration into something genuinely oppressive.

Still, the film holds its mystery remarkably well. Mickey Rourke gives Angel a loose, slightly shabby confidence that makes his eventual unravelling land harder, and Parker is good at planting images that feel as though they must matter. The repeated fans are the strangest example. They slow, reverse, recur and practically wave at us from the background, yet never quite explain themselves. Hell is hot, perhaps. That may be giving the ceiling fittings too much credit.

The final revelations arrive too quickly and some of the supernatural effects have aged badly, but the central reversal survives them. Angel Heart is a Faustian noir wearing folk-horror clothing, and occasionally discovering that the clothing fits better than expected.

Reviewed by FolknHell, the folk horror film podcast · folknhell com

Hear the full FolknHell podcast discussion of Angel Heart: folknhell com/angel-heart-review along with our other reviews, transcripts and episodes.