My Review (Spoilers, but the book is 700 years old, so)
This film is based on the 2010 game rather than the book, but they follow around the same plot. And as I just noted, it is seven hundred years old so I will be keeping the plot relatively brief, but elaborating on the differences. I think it’s anime, but I’m not sure. I found it under the anime tab on a streaming service I use but I don’t know how accurate it is.
The film opens with Dante traversing the dark forest. Unlike the book, Dante is a returning crusader looking for his fiancee Beatrice. He returns home to find his family slaughtered and Beatrice on her deathbed, stating that a foreigner killed them all. She dies, and as she ascends to heaven she is taken by Lucifer’s shadow into Hell, as an oath between them had been broken. Dante chases them to the door of the underworld, and is met by serpents who sew images of his sins onto him in the shape of a crucifix, and by the spirit of Virgil who tells him to pray for it to open. It opens for him and he descends into Hell, riding Charon into Limbo before killing him and taking a demon’s axe as his own. He and Virgil wander through Limbo, finding the soul of his dead child, had in secret by Beatrice out of wedlock. The duo encounters King Minos, who sentences souls to a circle of Hell, but Dante kills him. Venturing into the second circle, they find succubi and Dante happens upon the realization that he slept with another woman, who was trying to save her husband from being beaten to death. This was the vow that was broken. The two find a grotto of gluttons being eaten by Cerberus, and Virgil tells Dante to enter Cerberus to get to the next circle. He does, and then kills Cerberus, sending him into the next circle: greed. There, he finds his violently greedy and gluttonous father, who had been promised a thousand years free of punishment and a mountain of gold in exchange for killing his son. So Dante kills him. They descend into the fifth circle, and ride Phlegyas into the City of Dis. He chases Lucifer and Beatrice into the sixth circle where he finds Farinata, a man he hated for years. He taunts him with Satan’s intent to marry Beatrice, so naturally Dante kills him. The force of the death of Christ, which just happened on the surface, crumbles the sixth circle and Dante flees to the seventh. A minotaur blocks his path, but he kills it. They enter the forest of suicides where Dante finds his mother who killed herself out of shame for not being strong enough to stand up to her husband. Dante uses Beatrice’s cross to free her. Beatrice’s brother stops Dante, having been sent to the circle of Violence for committing evil deeds in the name of God, and Dante kills him and then proceeds to pray for his forgiveness. Dante enters the eighth circle alone, and finds Beatrice and Lucifer married. Beatrice attacks him for being a fraud (eighth circle sin) and beats him to a pulp. We realize that his entire family was killed by the husband of the woman he had adulterous sex with. Kinky. He frees Beatrice with her own cross and descends into the ninth circle. Dante immediately murders Lucifer, which actually freed his real body, as Beatrice was bait to lure a powerful warrior into Hell to free him. Lucifer beats Dante to a pulp and begins to descend into Purgatory, but Dante prays for help and divine light emanates from his sin crucifix, freezing Lucifer. Dante jumps into the Purgatory portal, rips off that sin crucifix, and shacks up with Beatrice comfortably between life and death.
My Review
Okay, so let me preface this with the fact that Dante’s Inferno is one of my favorite books of all time. In fact, I have a portion of it tattooed down my sternum. So I had a good handful of preconceived notions about this going into it. But I was pleasantly surprised by this film. I thought the deviations from the plot of the original novel were a nice touch, with an actual focus on Dante conquering his sins while he goes through Hell rather than sightseeing on his way to Heaven and Beatrice. Granted, this is the plot of Dante’s Purgatorio but it was nice to see the makers of the game/movie combine the two themes. I was relatively intrigued by the above-ground subplot happening and I was drawn in by the marriage of Beatrice and Lucifer. I though that him murdering a new creature at the end of each circle of hell was a reference to him overcoming his unbelievably huge list of sins, and I liked that. The art would change after each circle, signifying his change as a person, and that was neat. That being said, there was nothing that really stood out about the film. It was very clearly based on the plot of the game, which I don’t have any inherent issue with when done appropriately, which it was. My biggest issue with the film is that it stagnates very early on. It reaches a peak level of excitement very quickly with the Charon fight, and never reaches a higher level than that. On the whole, it was okay. It was an interesting watch, but I would recommend people play the game instead, as the pacing in it seems to make more sense dramatically than it does here. But if you like Inferno, this hour and 20 minutes isn’t badly spent, and the hybrid of the first and second portions of the Divine Comedy is interesting to see.
5/10
If you want other movies based on Dante, there is a 1911 Italian film that’s on YouTube. Also, Stan Brakhage made a hand-painted short film inspired by it, but good luck digging any meaning out of him. Last but not least, please refer to Holy Motors, by Leos Carax. I won’t spoil it, but it compares acting and movie making to Inferno through the main character’s adventure in the film, and it is quite good. It’s weird, but it’s fun.
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