!!WARNING: Contains major spoilers!!

Film noir and horror have often been good bed mates, the former’s trademark dark visuals and darker plots sitting comfortably with its sister genre almost since the very beginning. The Seventh Victim (1943), Nightmare Alley (1947) and Diabolique (1955) all blur the boundaries between the genres and there are plenty of other examples. One of the best is Alan Parker’s disturbing 80s gem, Angel Heart, made decades after noir peaked (it is, perhaps, more accurately “neo-noir”) but which made an exceptionally good job of mixing noir plot devices and characters with a reworking of the Faust legend and a violent strain of Southern Gothic.

In 1955 New York, shabby private investigator (is there any other kind in neo-noir?) Harry Angel (Mickey Rourke) meets with the mysterious Louis Cyphre (Robert De Niro) who wants him to track down John Liebling, a once popular singer better known as Johnny Favorite who disappeared after suffering neurological trauma during World War II. Cyphre has an undisclosed contract with Favorite who walked out of a private hospital and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Angel discovers that Favorite’s hospital records have been falsified by former doctor and now hopeless drug addict Albert Fowler (Michael Higgins) who commits suicide after Angel’s visit. Learning that Favorite had been engaged to the wealthy Margaret Krusemark (Charlotte Rampling) while carrying on an affair with a woman named Evangeline Proudfoot, Angel travels to New Orleans where Margaret tells him that Favorite is dead. He also meets 17-year-old Epiphany Proudfoot (Lisa Bonet), Evangeline and Favorite’s daughter. More murders occur, including that of Favorite’s former bandmate, blues guitarist Toots Sweet (Brownie McGhee) and Margaret, before the truth Is finally revealed to Angel by Ethan Krusemark (Stocker Fontelieu), Margaret’s father – Favorite was an occultist who sold his soul to Satan in exchange for fame and fortune and who performed a ritual sacrifice on a young soldier Times Square, stealing his soul. The name of that soldier… Harold Angel…

In truth, the twist doesn’t really work. If Favourite cut out and ate Angel’s heart, how has he ended up in the man’s body? No-one recognises Favorite anymore as he’s taken Angel’s identity but the hows and whys of it all are unclear. Which doesn’t really hurt the film as much as it might – the twist is still a good one, though the simultaneous reveal of Louis Cyphre’s identity has the feel of a too-clever-by-half word game (Louis Cyphre? Lucifer? Get it?).

The script, written by Parker, was based on a 1978 novel by William Hjortsberg titled Falling Angel which is a perfect description of its doomed leading man. Angel is a clueless schmuck, manipulated by all those around him, a man way out of his depth, a stranger in a very strange town and ultimately not even aware of his real identity, despite his tormented cries of “I know who I am!” He’s been descending into Hell – literalised in an unforgettable end credit sequence of him travelling downwards in a seemingly endless elevator – since Favorite sacrificed him and the Devil has been on his trail ever since. It all leads to a traumatising – for Angel – and decidedly downbeat ending that may have harmed its chances at the box office where, in modern parlance, it “under-performed” (it opened on the same day as crowd-pleasing box office juggernaut Lethal Weapon which wouldn’t have helped its chances much), not quite making back its production costs on its initial release.

Which is a crying shame as, though the ending may be confusing and illogical, the rest of the film has much going for it. It’s loaded with symbolism, some of it arcane and needing much work t decipher. Water is everywhere and in one of the film’s most controversial moments, a leaking roof in Angel’s New Orleans hotel room turns into a torrent of blood as he has aggressive sex with Epiphany – the fact that he’s having sex with his own daughter is just left hanging at the end of the film, the point not laboured, its horrible implications left up to us to work out. Elsewhere, spinning objects are a motif, a symbol perhaps of the impossibility of Angel escaping his fate, that no matter how hard and far he runs, it’s all going to come round to catch him out in the end. Fans whirr, the gears of elevators turn, records are played… and that lift shaft is one of the most potent images in any 80s horror film, a long, slow tumble into Hell where Cyphre is waiting (we hear his voice at the end whispering “Johnny” and Harry” suggesting that he’s taken both of their souls).

Rourke is excellent as Angel, one of the best and most intense performances of his chequered career. He captures the down-at-heel film-noir hero aesthetic perfectly and on second viewing we can see hints of the violent Favorite showing through Angel’s outwardly nice guy persona. It’s a performance good enough that at the climax, confused though we might be and unsure of how we’re meant to feel now about Angel, we still feel for him. That sobbing refrain of “I know who I am!” becomes more desperate with every utterance until his final acceptance of his fate which is just tragic – told that he’ll burn for what he did to Epiphany (her murder is horrific and has opened the film up to charges of misogyny) he calmly murmurs “I know. In Hell.” Bonet gets little of any substance to work with but manages to slough off the squeaky clean image she’d acquired playing Bill Cosby’s daughter on the television sitcom The Cosby Show (1984-1993), Brownie McGhee is very good as Toots Sweet though Charlotte Rampling barely gets in a look in in what turns out to be an extended cameo.

The show belongs though to De Niro as Cyphre. He’s not in it all that often either but when he is, he plays the part with a dark twinkle in his eye, bringing both charm and real menace to the outwardly urbane Cyphre. He can even make the simple act of shelling and eating a hard-boiled egg seem sinister. In one of the film’s many moments of very dark humour, Angel first meets him in the unlikely confines of a room above a church where one of the congregation has just shot himself to death – it’s not said if the mere presence of Cyphre in the building had anything to do with it, but you wouldn’t bet against it.

Beautifully shot in true film noir style (all shadows, pools of darkness and light filtering through those infernal fans) by Michael Seresin and with a superb score from Trevor Jones, Angel Heart deserved to do better than it did at the box office, though its reputation – some troubling moment notwithstanding – seems to have grown over the years. It was unfairly dismissed in some quarters as style over substance, but there’s a lot going on here and it’s often a more subtle film than it’s given credit for. A new adaptation of the book was announced in 2008 but no-one’s heard any more about that since. Maybe Cyphre had a word in someone’s ear…