"Harry Angel" (Mickey O'Rourke) lives a pretty hand-to-mouth existence as a New York PI when he is hired to track down a musician named "Johnny Favorite". Now this fella really doesn't want to be found, and after a while our street-smart investigator begins to contemplate that maybe this search isn't really all that his employer "Louis Cyphre" (a Rasputin-esque Robert De Niro) has in mind. As the search becomes more intricate, "Angel" finds himself having doors slammed in his face, or even worse before he is immersed in a world of voodoo in a distinctly unwelcoming New Orleans. Corpses are starting to pile up and "Angel" is starting to get cold feet. Can he stay the course and discover the whereabouts of his quarry? Can he also discover quite why the enigmatic "Cyphre" wanted him on the case in the first place? This is one of those whodunit's where the quest itself is not one of the more riveting parts of the plot. "Angel" has an ability to turn almost everyone he sees into metaphorical stone - including Charlotte Rampling's rather mysterious "Margaret" - what's going on? Alan Parker keeps the Hjortsberg story moving along quite faithfully to the book, allowing us to gradually get a sense that all is not as it seems, that poor old "Angel" is being manipulated and that things are probably not going to end well for him! O'Rourke carries that off really well - he injects a swarthi…

*Angel Heart* spends most of its running time pretending to be a detective story in which Harry Angel is following a trail into somebody else’s darkness. Its best trick is that the trail is his. Alan Parker shoots that investigation like a noir already half swallowed by something older. Rooms are all long shadows and backlight; New Orleans sometimes looks almost monochrome, until a little blue exhaust smoke gives the game away. The jazz and blues soundtrack keeps things grounded in gumshoe territory while religion, ritual, pentagrams, tarot and voodoo keep leaking in around the edges. Even Robert De Niro’s Louis Cyphre barely needs to do anything more threatening than peel an egg and maintain an increasingly magnificent set of fingernails. What makes the film particularly interesting to us is how close it comes to an inverted folk-horror structure. Angel enters communities he does not understand, pushes into their beliefs and private spaces, and assumes he is the investigator. But he is not the endangered outsider. He is the contamination. The people around him have rather more reason to fear his arrival than he has to fear them. That idea is stronger than the film’s use of the community itself. The voodoo material is atmospheric and suggestive, but too often feels like something Angel passes through rather than a system of belief actively pushing back against him. Character…

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