How far would you go for fame and fortune? Would you sell your soul? What if you changed your mind? How far would you go to get out? Alan Parker's Angel Heart is a horrifying twist on the old Faustian deal, a religious horror noir that cuts to the heart of questions of identity and the price of ambition.
It's just a few days into 1955 and Harry Angel is a detective living in Brooklyn. He is contacted by a lawyer representing a curious client, a man with the dime novel name of Louis Cyphre. (At this point, nearly forty years after the film's release, any horror buff who's even slightly savvy will have guessed the true identity of Cyphre, as if the perfect beard, the long fingernails, the pentagram ring, and the smoothly sinister countenance of Robert De Niro very much enjoying himself on set weren't dead giveaways already.) Cyphre hires Angel to track down Johnny Favorite, a one-time famous jazz musician who disappeared in Europe during a USO tour in World War II.
The job takes Harry from a mental institution upstate to New Orleans, a bleak, foggy city of jazz and voodoo, and some people aren't too happy with Harry being there. It doesn't help that everyone he talks to on the trail of Favorite sooner or later winds up dead, and the evidence is increasingly pointing to Harry. The closer he gets to the truth, the worse his nightmares get, the more gruesome the murders.
Angel Heart is an almost-forgotten classic, a neo-noir dealing with the occult at a time when fantastic noir was an almost brand new genre, seeing a sudden heyday alongside cyberpunk noir (inspired by Blade Runner, of course) and more straightforward neo-noir in the mid to late 1980s. Tonally it's very similar to Jacob's Ladder, Adrian Lyne's 1990 cult psychological horror hit: there's a nightmarish feel to the film from start to finish, the hero moving from disturbing scene to disturbing scene rife with symbolism and unsettling imagery. The Harlem church where Harry first meets his client is a nexus of surreality, hosting an energetic service with a reverend who seems more cult leader than man of God; upstairs, a woman silently cleans blood from a room where a congregant committed suicide. Later, as the trail leads Harry to New Orleans, he is witness to a voodoo ritual, discovers a local mystic murdered with her heart cut out, and has increasingly violent, disturbing dreams.
The film doubles as an interesting religious commentary; despite the wildness of the voodoo ritual, a character rather pointedly impresses on Harry that her fellow believers don't kill people, meanwhile the Christianity that Harry so steadfastly avoids is built on a kind of human sacrifice. God and the gods seemingly have no place in this film, only the Devil, slick and sardonic.
There aren't many films like Angel Heart. Released as it was in the late 1980s, it seemed almost deliberately crafted to rattle sensibilities. Lisa Bonet was seeking more dramatic roles after several years of playing Denise Huxtable, the most popular character on The Cosby Show, and the sex scene in which the 19-year-old Bonet plays 17-year-old Epiphany Proudfoot was cut to ribbons to satisfy MPAA rules and shocked Bonet's fellow cast and crew on the Cosby set. Nevertheless, like Jacob's Ladder, the film has proven influential, a kind of Chinatown-meets-The Devil's Advocate nightmare the DNA of which can be seen in the likes of the Gabriel Knight adventure game series and even Silent Hill. And maybe we can trace the overall idea back to the 1949 noir classic Alias Nick Beal, in which Satan in disguise tempts a high-powered district attorney into selling his soul.
I like Angel Heart. I've been a big fan of Jacob's Ladder for years, and Angel Heart is a great companion piece, similar in tone and mood and nightmarish, almost sacrilegious imagery, with Angel Heart making repeated use of symbolism of a sinister-looking antique elevator hinting at a descent into moral and spiritual ruin. New York and New Orleans seem like they're already on the shores of hell, a nightmare world of crumbling buildings, poverty, and bad weather. If you liked Jacob's Ladder — and if you're a Silent Hill fan I know damn well you've probably seen it already — you owe it to yourself to watch Angel Heart too.
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