Hellhole

Imagine a place where the walls seem to sweat grease, the air tastes like wet wool and old incense, and the "daily special" in the canteen looks like something pulled from a clogged drain. This is the world of Bartosz M. Kowalski’s Hellhole (2022), or Ostatnia Wieczerza if you’re feeling linguistic. It’s a film that arrived on Netflix with relatively little fanfare, buried under a mountain of true crime documentaries and reality shows about people dating in pods, but for those of us who live for the dark corners of international cinema, it was a major "holy crap" moment.

I watched this on a Tuesday night while my radiator was making a rhythmic clicking sound that matched the onscreen tension a little too perfectly, and I’m telling you, this is the most fun I’ve had with a religious horror flick since I first saw a possessed girl turn her head like a swivel chair.

Not Your Grandma’s Exorcism

Set in 1987, the story follows Marek (Piotr Żurawski), a young policeman posing as a monk to infiltrate a remote Polish monastery. The monks claim to run a clinic for the "possessed," but the girls they’re "treating" keep vanishing. Marek is a skeptic, looking for a very human kidnapper, but he quickly finds himself drowning in a sea of brown robes and bad intentions.

What I love about the setup is how it plays with our expectations of the "Exorcism" subgenre. In the streaming era, we’ve been flooded with cheap Exorcist clones that rely on loud noises and CGI demon faces. Kowalski, who previously gave us the fun-but-messy slasher Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight, pivots here into something much grimmer and more atmospheric. He spends the first hour leaning into the mystery: Is this a supernatural event, or is it just a bunch of weird old men performing elaborate theater to keep their power? The food in this movie looks like it was harvested from the back of a 1970s refrigerator, and that grimy, tactile quality makes the horror feel earned rather than manufactured.

The Beauty of the Bleak

The cinematography by Cezary Stolecki is what really hooked me. Everything is doused in a sickly, jaundiced yellow and a deep, bruised brown. It captures that specific Eastern European aesthetic of "everything is old, damp, and probably broken." Olaf Lubaszenko, playing the prior, brings a heavy, terrifying gravitas to the role. He doesn't need to scream or jump out of shadows; he just sits there eating grey mash and looking like a man who has looked into the abyss and found it quite cozy.

As Marek digs deeper, he encounters brother Piotr (Sebastian Stankiewicz) and brother Antoni (Lech Dyblik). These aren't the saintly monks of classic cinema; they are weary, dirty, and deeply unsettling. The film excels at "spatial storytelling"—the monastery itself feels like a character, a labyrinth of stone that wants to swallow Marek whole. I found myself leaning away from my screen during the scenes in the "sanatorium," not because of jump scares, but because the atmosphere was so heavy I felt like I needed a shower.

A Twist That Actually Bites

In an era of "franchise fatigue" and predictable plots, Hellhole does something truly daring in its final act. I won’t spoil it here, because the "spoiler culture" we live in has already ruined too many surprises, but I will say this: The ending is a middle finger to every "safe" horror movie you've seen in the last decade. It shifts gears from a slow-burn mystery into full-blown, hallucinatory folk horror.

The practical effects during the climax are genuinely impressive for a film that likely didn't have a Marvel-sized budget. There’s a weight to the gore and the creature design that you just don't get with pure CGI. It’s a testament to the talent coming out of Poland right now. Kowalski and his co-writer Mirella Zaradkiewicz clearly know their horror history, nodding to everything from Rosemary’s Baby to the works of Ken Russell, but they package it in a way that feels fresh for a 2022 audience.

The film is a bit of a "hidden gem" because Netflix’s algorithm tends to favor English-language content, but Hellhole is a reminder of why we should look past the subtitles. It’s a lean 90 minutes—no fluff, no "filler" subplots about Marek’s childhood trauma that go nowhere—just a straight descent into the pit.

Hellhole is a grim, stylish, and ultimately shocking piece of contemporary horror that deserves a lot more eyes on it than it currently has. It manages to take the tired tropes of religious possession and flip them on their head, providing a climax that will leave you staring at the credits in a stunned silence. If you’re tired of the "safe" scares of the multiplex, do yourself a favor: turn off the lights, ignore the clicking of your radiator, and step into the monastery. Just don't eat anything they offer you.