Drag Me to Hell (2009)
An unfortunate career decision, followed by extremely poor customer service from hell.
Directed by Sam Raimi · 99 minutes
Source-based draft ready for editorial review. Critical readings, verdict and advisories are proposed.
Version note: 99 minutes identifies the theatrical film; an unrated home-video version also exists.
Drag Me to Hell takes a moral compromise at work and supplies it with a demonic collections department. Sam Raimi's attraction to collisions between cruelty and slapstick gives the premise its particular bite. A scare can be disgusting, funny and unfair in the same breath.
That unfairness is part of the story's interest. It also needs to be examined rather than waved away because the film is enjoying itself.
Before you watch
Contains sustained supernatural terror, grotesque violence and bodily-fluid gags, a child in fatal peril and the sacrifice of a cat. The curse narrative relies on a hostile Roma caricature. The BBFC documents the horror and violence; Common Sense Media supplies additional scene guidance for the theatrical version.
The setup
Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) wants a promotion at her bank. After she refuses an elderly woman's request for a mortgage extension, an encounter with the woman leaves her facing a curse. Christine attempts to keep her ordinary life intact while finding a way to escape the supernatural punishment. Cannes provides the official premise and the 99-minute runtime.
A punishment machine
Raimi's horror-comedy method depends on timing and impact. An assault can become a gag because of its duration, its impossible physical escalation or the indignity it heaps on the victim. A bodily assault becomes a gag through impossible duration and escalating indignity; the threat still matters because Christine remains the person experiencing it, even when physics has become a cartoon.
Christine is a productive centre for this treatment because she has made a choice. The story does not begin with pure innocence encountering random evil. It begins with ambition, economic pressure and a moment in which someone else's vulnerability becomes professionally inconvenient. Her efforts to escape then create further choices, giving the curse more dramatic use than a countdown alone would provide.
The problem is the vehicle chosen for that moral fable. The film's presentation of its Roma antagonist draws on a long-standing association between an ethnic outsider and a contaminating curse. Enjoying the staging does not remove that baggage. The contrast between Christine’s ordinary aspirations and Ganush’s grotesque presentation makes the imbalance especially conspicuous. The older horror tradition explains the device; it does not settle whether it works acceptably here.
Corny DNA
This is deliberate comic excess with a nasty streak. Gross-out invention and a talking-about-it-afterwards premise make it a strong fit for the collection. The animal death and stereotyping remain relevant to a recommendation even when the filmmaking is energetic.
Verdict
Watch with caveats — proposed. A plausible recommendation for viewers who like forceful, mischievous horror comedy, with clear reservations about the caricature and the use of animal suffering. The owner's tolerance for those elements should carry more weight than a general claim that Raimi has returned to form.
Spoilers from here
Reveal the plot details and ending
A transfer she can live with
Christine considers passing the cursed button to her colleague, then attempts to give it back to the dead Ganush. Her apparent solution fails because she has used the wrong envelope: the button remains in Clay's car. At the station, he returns it and Christine is dragged into hell. The plot account corroborates the exchange.
The ending is a practical mistake attached to a moral structure. Christine has become willing to negotiate with someone else's damnation, yet the final punishment does not arrive through a grand act of judgment. It arrives through an ordinary mix-up, after her prospects at work and in love have improved. The cruelty is the joke, and the joke is allowed to remain cruel.
The cost of the comedy
The cat sacrifice belongs to Christine's changing willingness to make something else pay. It also makes the animal a particularly expendable instrument of the film's nasty humour. A viewer can admire the construction and still regard that choice as a substantial impediment to enjoyment.
The same distinction applies to Ganush's presentation. A clever mechanism for guilt and punishment can still depend on an ethnic caricature. The film's vigorous craft does not require the review to excuse the materials it animates.