This piece contains spoilers for Angel Heart
Which is more frightening: discovering that you do not know who you are, or experiencing the merciless clarity of total self-knowledge, warts and all? And can who you are now ever truly be separated from who you have been?
These questions lie at the rotten core of director Alan Parker’s unique 1987 neo-noir horror film Angel Heart, informing its genre-twisting approach like a canker gnawing at the viewer’s soul. Adapted by Parker from William Hjortsberg’s 1978 novel Falling Angel, it tells the story of 1950s private detective Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) who is hired by the enigmatic Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) to trace a forgotten 40s crooner named Johnny Favourite. Cyphre holds a mysterious contract with the missing man involving “certain collateral…to be forfeited in the event of his death.” The case turns into a nightmare, and as the bodies start to stack up, it seems that there may be even more than just lives at stake.
On its surface, the film lovingly recreates the look and style of classic film noir, liberally spiced with the saltier sex, language, and violence of post-Hays code cinema. External light contrasts sharply with dark interiors as Angel moves through a murky world far more morally compromised than he suspects. His shabby office is dim but for the grimy backlight of the windows, idly illuminating the obligatory bottle of muddy whisky and drawers of yellowing ephemera. Even the environments of the more well-to-do seem cloaked in the crepuscular; the opulent apartment of Margaret Krusemark (Charlotte Rampling) is painted an uncomfortably fleshy shade of sunset terracotta, and Cyphre favours meeting in ornate, shadowy rooms panelled with wood, curtains, or carvings.
Filmed entirely on location, the venues chosen in Harlem and New Orleans ooze with faded gothic grandeur, facades and archways looming over the characters in low-angled shots. The colours of Michael Seresin’s gorgeously evocative cinematography are deliberately desaturated to almost monochromatic effect. This results in the strongest hues dominating the screen, perhaps most notably in the repeated shot of the tenement haunting Angel’s dreams, its small single red-lit window contrasting with the grey walls to draw the eye ominously towards the horror within.
At first glance, the film seems intent on reviving old-fashioned images of good and bad in the outfits and class of the male protagonists. The sinister Cyphre is elegantly dressed in black suits, the traditional colour of cinematic villainy. Further, his air of worldly sophistication and ambiguity recalls other famous antagonists of classic noir, such as Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo in John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) or the suave deviants of Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). The knowing smile De Niro brings to the part almost suggests a certain performative self-awareness, a sense that the character is relishing playing just such a role for his own devious purposes.
Angel meanwhile sports a cream suit, and his cynical humour and references to his supposed Brooklyn origins initially fit the stereotype of the hard-nosed but heroic private eye. Yet his clothes look too large for him, as though they are not really his, and his suit darkens with dirt and sweat as the film progresses. The nose shield he wears further serves to alert the audience to his unreliability, visually recalling Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974) — a flawed detective destroyed by his case. It gradually becomes clear that neither his name nor his outfits really belong to the increasingly unglued Angel, Rourke’s spell-binding performance carrying the audience along with him on every step of his downward journey. By the time we meet Ethan Krusemark (Stocker Fontelieu), the film has completely turned traditional wardrobe on its head; the only character to wear a pure white suit is revealed to be a committed Satanist. Appearances cannot be trusted, and every single significant character is leading some kind of double life.
While the brief role of Connie (Elizabeth Whitcraft) approximates the stereotype of the ‘good’ girl, loyal and helpful but of limited interest to the hero, the larger female roles deny or reverse audience expectations. Margaret Krusemark initially seems set to be the story’s femme fatale – poised, mysterious, and aloof. Her abrupt and horrible demise pulls the rug out from under such assumptions, the sharp shock warning the audience that the plot’s macabre elements are rising inexorably to the surface.
Angel’s real interests come to lie fatefully with Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet). Uncomfortably young (Bonet was 18 at the time, and best known for the then-respected The Cosby Show), the secretive and independent Epiphany actively resists the good or bad girl clichés viewers might expect. She is a priestess in the Voodoo church, her religious beliefs setting her at even greater odds with the white community of racially segregated 1950s Louisiana. Much pre-emptive criticism of the film was based on the notion that it would perpetuate the Hollywood trope of equating Voodoo with evil. However, Epiphany’s faith, although arguably still depicted as exotic and sometimes gruesome, is essentially a red herring, with the story’s truly malevolent force emerging instead from mainstream Christian theology. Epiphany is never the villain, and her misguided attraction to Angel is genuine (though her part in the film is somewhat truncated when compared to the active assistance and protection she provides in the novel). Subversively, it is ultimately the nominal hero who is a lethal threat to her, not vice versa, and her final fate is both horrifying and utterly undeserved.
A further female figure looms large in the background, in the ghostly form of Epiphany’s deceased mother. The late Evangeline was Favourite’s secret lover, faithfully serving him only to die while awaiting his return from his mysterious disappearance. Repeated references are made to her, but while her presence is felt she is never definitively seen. It seems possible that she may be the ominous woman in black haunting Angel’s visions, a mute but sinisterly eloquent portent of doom — although the film suggests otherwise with the figure’s final appearance, deliberately leaving the viewer uncertain as to how to interpret what they have seen.
Although Parker’s script dispenses with some of Hjortsberg’s more obvious clues, such as meeting Cyphre at 666 Fifth Avenue, the supernatural twist is still heavily signposted. It is to the credit of both the film and the novel that they remain so gripping and disturbing despite some slightly clumsy foreshadowing. Louis Cyphre’s moniker is not subtle, although hiding his true identity in such plain sight may mislead some with its sheer audacity. Parker’s title change from Falling Angel is similarly clever-and-obvious, retaining the clear religious irony of Angel’s name while using ‘heart’ to refer to both the story’s journey to the depths of his soul, and the literal organ eaten by Favourite to try and escape his infernal contract. The divergent choices of location between film and book also make a fascinating contrast, emphasising completely different climates to achieve the same overall effect. The novel stays entirely in wintery New York, the biting cold increasing the story’s merciless chill, while Parker moves the second half to New Orleans, the fierce heat palpably inflaming its sweaty, claustrophobic terror.
Both novel and film favour a sustained tone of dread over explicitly supernatural carnage. The director explained to an audience at the British Film Institute in April 2018 that he had wanted the film to be “for real, I didn’t really want it to be surreal, or a horror movie.” This approach certainly helps to keep the story grounded at its crucial points, skilfully avoiding a descent into the ridiculous. Instead, the film makes inspired use of the gothic horror latent in classic noir imagery (the genre itself having been heavily influenced by the uncanny shadows of German Expressionism). Diners, apartments, and hallways are always eerily dim and deserted, their absence of life a clear threat. Electric fans scythe the air in close-up, chopping out light to thicken rather than filter the oppressive atmosphere. Their relentless whir becomes a harbinger of death, their bladed wheels slicing up the dwindling reserves of time left to the doomed characters. Angel’s visions frequently involve a descending elevator, the shadows of its protective grill door enveloping him like the bars of a cell. By the final sequence, the elevator has literally become his cage as he descends to his lonely place in Hell.
The score, written by Trevor Jones and laced with evocative saxophone solos by Courtney Pine, makes highly effective use of smouldering jazz standards, particularly the classic Girl of My Dreams (a 40s hit for Favourite in the film’s fictional world). The tune recurs throughout, firstly as a full-band lament, then played alone on an off-pitch piano. Each repetition becomes more unsettling as it interweaves with eerie ambient sounds and discords; cumulatively, it becomes as though the song itself were crumbling alongside the tormented detective.
Inevitably, mirrors are the key image in a film about the horrors of self-knowledge and deception. As Cyphre observes in an almost direct quotation from the novel: “However cleverly you sneak up on a mirror, your reflection always looks you straight in the eye.” Angel is repeatedly shown in reflective surfaces, particularly in moments of revelation, and his character is essentially lost through the looking-glass, living on borrowed time in a fantasy made from another man’s memories. As his world of make-believe begins to crumble, he smashes a mirror with his fist, gazing in agony at his own shattered image. His final confrontation with Cyphre leaves him at the looking-glass one last time — now firmly trapped in reality and burdened with the appalling truth. Leaving aside his supernatural origins, Cyphre himself is essentially a mirror, his purpose being to force Angel and the traumatised audience to recognise the darkness dwelling unknown in their own hearts. It is the film’s insistent probing of what lies beneath and our inability to escape from ourselves that ultimately makes it so frightening and powerful.
