His latest piece of music transports a modern day composer (Danny Ashkenasi) back to the dark ages where he's taken captive by the inquisition, tried (by himself as it is), thrown into a pitch dark dungeon where he almost falls into a bottomless pit, then tied to a rack beneath an ever descending pendulum with a blade mounted to its end to cut up our unlucky hero, and finally he sees the walls literally closing in on him, driving him to the bottomless pit should he not want to be crushed. However, what the composer only imagines has also consequences in the real world ...

Now Edgar Allan Poe's original story The Pit and the Pendulum isn't so much a story of narrative finesse as it is a description of the terrors of torture, and thus doesn't lend itself all too well to cinematic adaptations - which in turn means that those who have tried (and there were quite a few over the years) usually take quite some artistic licence with the source material. Danny Ashkenasi has taken a different route though and has remained fairly faithful to Poe's story but put it into a narrative context via his framing story, as well as setting everything to music, so much so that some of Poe's words are actually sung on screen. And this works remarkably well, as not only does Ashkenasi hit the right note when it comes to the film's mood, he also enriches the story with nightmarish and often surreal imagery, often goes for associative rather than linear storytelling, and ultimately delivering and enjoyably disturbing piece of cinema.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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