After being placed in a strange afterlife, a woman finds herself continuously forced to watch the torment of those around her to help determine the true value of a cruel lesson about herself, and the longer she stays in the tormented scenario the more her mind and body break which hinders her quest even further.
This was a generally solid but somewhat trouling genre effort. When this one works, it's due to the solid atmosphere that emerges from the setup that serves to unleash stomach-churning gore at every opportunity. Given the presentation offering up simple excuses for her to encounter the people from her life in a series of intense, brutal and well-choreographed torture sequences offering demonic creatures taking BDSM tools and other nefarious tools to graphically rip victims apart in unrelenting sequences, the film works rather nicely. Mangling parts and splitting open their body to generate spectacular gore-gags with oceans of bloodshed during the scene, these scenes stay in the mind rather nicely with the impressive nature of the setups including the scenes in various lighting arrangements that add an extra layer of psychological torment to the proceedings. This psychological approach carries over rather nicely into the general plotline involving her quest to uncover the truth about her tormented state and constant torture. The addition of the color-coded levels that are supposed to signal the separate points of her psyche that needs to be uncovered is a fantastic aspect introduced here as there's a lot of fun to be had with how this takes on the running storyline involving her surviving the torture to determine the point of the experience and purpose of her life. Regardless of the effectiveness this storyline aspect brings into the film, there's a lot of impressive work here that gives this a rather surprising and unforeseen final half which adds a lot to like with this one. That said, there are a few problems to be had with this one. The main issue is the generally confusing and nonsensical storyline that wraps all this surreal imagery and gore together which doesn't make any sense. Not only is there no excuse for a film like this that barely tops out at an hour to feature useless padding such as the visit from the mailman destroying the bathroom or the shopping trip picking up supplies that don't mean anything to the end result of the film but it tends to take up time that could've been spent spelling out what's going on. There's very little mentioned here about why she's going through this process to begin with since the beginning stages involving her everyday life don't signal this and to then put everything into this coded mystery involving the meaning of various colors and the connection to her own spiritual journey becomes quite confusing and disorienting.
Rated Unrated/NC-17: Continuous Full Male and Female Nudity, Extreme Graphic Violence, Extreme Graphic Language, perverse sexual actions and children-in-jeopardy.
