The Black Pit of Dr. M opens on a scientist’s rotting manse, its architecture crumbled and malformed into forbidding Xs: a bare geometry of egotism brought to its knees. When we see the building in its prime, though, its pretensions already seem pathetic. Pivotal early shots of the scientist’s laboratory present the impossible-to-describe location with natural outgrowths hovering just into the frame, fraying the clean edges of this image of modern science failing to keep the forces of nature at bay. The clarity of the frame itself, or rather the lack of clarity, becomes an evocation of the film’s critique of scientific hubris, an insidious reminder about the dangers of “the impossible … always within the realm of the possible.”

When it begins, The Black Pit of Dr. M seems almost fearlessly classical. Its major theme is horror’s ur-concern: the exploration of scientists searching beyond the pale of knowledge. We begin with two esteemed men of science promising one another that when one dies, they will find a way to inform the other about the secrets of death, the mysteries of the universe itself, from beyond the grave. When Dr. Jacinto Aldama (Antonio Raxel) does indeed pass away, his first ghostly call is to his daughter Patricia (Mapita Cortés), a more intimate encounter that will only figure in to the story much later. When Dr. Masali (Rafael Bertrand) is finally visited, though, the elusive nature of their encounter comes with unexpected consequences that expose the fault-lines of his quest to frame the essence of life as a question of rote knowledge of death.

While the ironic way in which Dr. Masali’s desire is fulfilled ultimately marks Black Pit as one in a long line of Monkey’s Paw stories, a cautionary tale about the risks of aspiring to circumvent the laws of nature, there’s something wild and woolly about this particular version of the age-old story. In fact, while the final moral comeuppance seems almost fatalistically predetermined, Fernando Mendez’s film spends most of its run-time forgoing the apparent conflict altogether. Masali’s experiments in understanding madness take center stage for the first third, before the film becomes a story about a deformed young scientist, Dr. Eduardo Jiménez (Gastón Santos), who bears the violence of these experiments on his face, and who prowls around the compound like a self-inflicted ghoul, a corporealized specter of science gone awry. Only in the final minutes do the strands, like ingredients in an unholy experiment testing the narrative Gods, come together like the crude poetry of a corpse badly but lovingly stitched together out of the detritus of other films.

Somehow, this story is not only spartan – minimalist – but digressive – amusingly aimless – in a way that implies both the hubris of science’s interest in narrating a linear story about scientific progress and the exploratory underbelly of that very science, skulking through this building in search of many other truths that aren’t reducible to one straightforward narrative arc. If the good doctor demands an uncomplicated progression from darkness to light, ignorance to enlightenment, the film contorts his high-concept scientific metanarratives by getting lost in various linked sketches of science at odds with humanity. 

At times, the film even admits space for sudden implosions of geographic contiguity, as in a sudden transmogrification of the screen into an unannounced party that seemingly occurs in the void itself, drifting humans dancing in the background like a damned party out of Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad. Diegetically, it’s a stage-show of some kind, but, on screen, it evokes a liminal netherworld of scientific puppets dancing in many directions without end, controlled by some unseen master. How we got here, and its relationship to the space in which the rest of the film occurs, is completely unclarified. The film may want it, as a moral imperative, to remain so. Given the obtuseness of the set design for Dr. Masali’s main scientific compound, the stage show could be part of the compound itself, just one more theater where animated experiments of scientific hubris are playing out their illusion of freedom.

Graced with the gift of a moment of pure openness, the mind begins to reel. Is this performance space the void becoming animate, swallowing man’s hubris? Is art the exposure of the emptiness of scientism, the cracking open of the pursuit of knowledge confronted with the sheer chaos of something beyond its capacity to calculate? Earlier, when asked what has befallen his enterprise, one character can only answer “nothing,” before adding, “something as ancient as mankind.” We’re beyond space here, beyond matter, touching some cosmic abstraction of eternity.

By the time the story finally coagulates into a “thing,” it does so not through Newtonian rigidities and substances but oddly resonant electromagnetic fields. One body, tortured by its own complicity with these experiments, goes in the ground, and another soul is reborn in it, having found its unholy answer to a universe-tampering question in an unexpected form. Such a strange Rude-Goldberg of narrative contrivances spreading out in many directions suddenly freezes into clarity like ice, trapping one man in his own mental limitations. The ghoulishly effective acid-scarred make-up anointing this body is actually quite sophisticated, but the film is at its best when it hides the broken-down-man-creature, treating him (it) more as a shadow, an empty space where any mind or body might suddenly find itself. In one great moment, his head is hidden behind a lamplight hanging from the ceiling, a black hole and a new vision, a darkness and a brilliance. He is both herald of a life beyond death and harbinger of that life’s essential meaninglessness. When the figure bursts into flames at the end of the film, the light of certainty, the need for knowledge, has erupted only to realize that it has been haunted by a pact with truth that may have forgotten the very meaning of the word.

Score: 7.5/10