Hellraiser (2022)

David Bruckner's 2022 Hellraiser arrives as the eleventh entry in a franchise that has spent decades wandering in the desert, and it returns to Clive Barker's novella with a certain grim professionalism. The puzzle box is back. The Cenobites glide in on their leather and hooks. The most discussed alteration is the Priest, formerly Pinhead, now embodied by Jamie Clayton in a performance of cold, unhurried menace. Around her, the film assembles a young cast that includes a gay couple, Matt and Colin, treated with the matter-of-factness of people who simply share an apartment. Nobody announces them. Nobody hands them a pamphlet. They exist, and the box does not care who they love.

The cultural inventory here is interesting mostly for its sparseness. The inclusive casting is real and deliberate, a gender-swapped icon and a queer supporting household, though the film never builds a thesis out of either. Its protagonist is a woman, Riley, and its antagonist is a female deity of suffering, which gestures at something without arguing for it. The villain is a hedonistic millionaire who buys sensation and receives a nerve-twisting contraption for his trouble, a faint whiff of contempt for the very rich that never hardens into a critique. The film has no interest in climate, race, body acceptance, or neurodivergence. Its addiction subplot is texture, not diagnosis. Body horror, after all, is the opposite of a compliment.

What remains is a competent, occasionally elegant horror picture that has absorbed the casting conventions of its era without adopting its sermonizing. It does not lecture. It does not explain itself. It opens the box, and something old and wet crawls out. Long-suffering fans of the series may find this sufficient. Those seeking a moral lesson will have to look elsewhere, preferably somewhere with fewer chains.

{"thematic_tags": ["remake", "book_adaptation"]}