What the Hell
2024 · 9m · Canada
Directed by Valerie Barnhart
Genres: animation, dark comedy, fantasy
Tones: absurdist, darkly comic, theatrical
As Dante's Inferno collapses around her, a sharp-tongued harpy named Charlotte plots her escape, only to be trapped in an elevator with her minotaur ex-boyfriend.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A harpy and her minotaur ex stuck in an elevator while Hell literally crumbles—it's the kind of premise that shouldn't work but somehow does, mixing classical mythology with rom-com claustrophobia in a way that feels genuinely subversive rather than clever-clever.
The film demonstrates formal control in its compression of Dantean architecture into a single elevator, using spatial constraint as both comedic and thematic pressure—though the execution's theatrical excess occasionally strains against the discipline the form demands.
What elevates this beyond its high-concept setup is the voice work; Charlotte's sharp, wounded delivery in those cramped exchanges cuts through the absurdism and makes the exes' dynamic—resentment threaded with real feeling—the actual engine of the piece.