The 2022 Hellraiser is the eleventh film, and the second screen version of Clive Barker’s 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart. The first was the 1987 movie. David Bruckner directed. Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski wrote the script, from a story that also has David S. Goyer on it. It puts the Cenobites back in the center as sadomasochists dressed like a terrible fashion line, after later sequels had shrunk them to guest spots. For adult fetish viewers the box is a ritual again. Each configuration is a transaction. Each gift is a contract you do not get to cancel.
Odessa A’zion plays Riley McKendry, who is trying to stay off whatever she was using. She lives with her estranged brother Matt, Matt’s boyfriend Colin, and their roommate Nora. In an abandoned warehouse Riley and her boyfriend Trevor find the puzzle box. After a fight about relapse, Riley solves one configuration in a park. She misses the blade. The Cenobites still appear and demand another sacrifice. Matt cuts himself on the box to wake her, then vanishes from a restroom. The box changes shape.
The Cenobites are humanoids who treat pain as a way to stay vividly alive. Jamie Clayton, a trans woman, plays the Priest, the figure earlier films called Pinhead. The performance is cold and exact. She moves through the frame like a runway model who has already been flayed, and she does not do the late-series one-liners. She is closer to Barker’s explorer of experience, and she enforces the rules. Reviewers described the look as fashion made of red flesh and raw meat.
Riley and Trevor go to Voight’s former lawyer, Serena Menaker. Serena tries to take the box, gets cut, and the Cenobites take her. Hiam Abbass is among the supporting players. Journals in the mansion describe six configurations. Each one needs a victim marked by the blade. After that, Leviathan gives a gift. The gift is a trap. Roland Voight, played by Goran Višnjić, is a hedonist millionaire. Six years earlier, at an orgy in the mansion, he forced Joey, a homeless sex worker, to solve the box. The blade cut Joey. Chains tore him apart. Voight asked for sensation and was given a machine that twists the nerves.
Riley sees Matt, flayed. Colin, Trevor, and Nora arrive. Nora is caught in a hidden passage. The mutilated Voight, inside the walls, stabs her with the box. The Cenobites abduct Nora. The Priest tortures her and flays her. The restroom is where Matt vanished, not where Nora is skinned. After a car crash the Priest offers Riley a trade: two sacrifices for Matt, or two other people, or Riley herself. Riley will not buy Matt with other people. After Chatterer wounds Trevor, she solves a configuration and marks Chatterer as the sacrifice.
They fall back behind the mansion’s steel doors. Voight stabs Colin with the box, admits he hired Trevor to find victims, completes the last configuration, traps the Cenobites, and tells Leviathan to let him out of the nerve machine. Riley gets the box back and marks Trevor as the final sacrifice, which frees Colin. The Priest warns him that a reward can be exchanged and cannot be revoked. Voight accepts power. He is healed, then impaled and lifted, and in Leviathan’s realm he becomes a new Cenobite. The Cenobites offer to resurrect Matt. Riley refuses. She takes the lament instead, a short bitter suffering. The box returns to a cube. Colin asks if the choice was justified. She does not answer. She drives.
A remake had been in talk since 2006, with Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo, and Marcus Dunstan among the names, and with Hellraiser: Revelations rushed out to hold the rights. Clive Barker at one point meant to direct it himself. After a legal fight he got the U.S. rights back in December 2020. Bruckner made the film at Spyglass. A’zion was cast in June 2021. Clayton was announced as the Priest only after the shoot wrapped. Drag performer Gottmik auditioned. Bradley refused a cameo. He wanted the Pinhead he had played left intact. They shot in Belgrade, Serbia, in September and October 2021.
The world premiere was a secret screening at Fantastic Fest in Austin on 28 September 2022, then Beyond Fest in Santa Monica, then Hulu on 7 October 2022. The reviews are mixed to positive. A lot of people called it the strongest since the original, especially in how seriously it takes Barker’s repulsive glamour. Katie Rife at Polygon faulted the characters and the length, praised the design and Clayton, and ranked the film possibly second, after the movie Hellbound. Dave White at TheWrap praised the Cenobites’ repulsive glamour. Mark Hanson at Slant called it toothless and backward-looking. Rotten Tomatoes: 67% positive out of 147 reviews, average 6.3/10. Metacritic: 55/100 from 25 reviews. The UK DVD is 27 March 2023. The sex, the marked bodies, and the gifts are between adults. Saying yes to the wrong gift rewrites the body. Riley’s yes is to regret, not to a rescue.
