Some films age into respectability. Angel Heart did the opposite: it arrived as a slightly disreputable shocker and has slowly hardened into a classic, the kind of picture quoted in film-school seminars about how to make dread look beautiful.

It is, on paper, a private-eye story. A scruffy New York investigator named Harry Angel takes a missing-person job from a courtly, faintly sinister client and starts pulling a thread. What he doesn’t yet understand, and what the audience only begins to suspect, is that the thread is attached to his own throat.

A detective story that opens a trapdoor

Harry’s search carries him out of grimy Harlem and down into a New Orleans that steams with blues clubs, storefront churches and voodoo ceremony. Bodies pile up around him, each killing more baroque than the last, and the case stops being about who took the vanished crooner Johnny Favorite and becomes about who Harry himself really is. Adapting William Hjortsberg’s novel Falling Angel, Alan Parker builds the film as a noir that keeps tilting toward horror until the floor finally gives way.

Parker’s craft, Seresin’s camera

Mickey Rourke as Harry Angel in Angel Heart (1987) — Angel Heart (1987)

The reason the film endures is texture. Cinematographer Michael Seresin shoots 1955 in amber and shadow, and Parker fills the frame with a private grammar of menace: ceiling fans, falling water, descending elevators, blood blooming where it shouldn’t be. Trevor Jones’s score slides between jazz, Delta blues and a low synthesised hum of unease. It is one of the most physically atmospheric American films of its decade; you can almost smell the gumbo and the rot.

Rourke, De Niro and a cast in freefall

Mickey Rourke, at the height of his bruised, sweaty charisma, is perfect casting, an actor who looks like he is already lost and simply hasn’t read the last page yet. Opposite him, Robert De Niro plays the elegant Louis Cyphre with terrifying restraint, all manicured nails and slowly peeled eggs, doing more with stillness than most villains manage by shouting. Lisa Bonet, cast hard against her wholesome television image, and Charlotte Rampling as a doomed society fortune-teller complete an ensemble that all seem to be falling at the same speed.

The scandal, and why it lasts

On release the film was best known for its fight with the censors: a frank, blood-spattered love scene between Rourke and Bonet drew an X rating until Parker trimmed a few seconds to earn an R, and Bonet’s involvement, while she was a star of The Cosby Show, turned a stylish horror picture into a tabloid story. The noise has faded; the film has not. What once played as provocation now plays as commitment, a movie willing to follow its bargain all the way down to make the deal feel real.

The verdict

Angel Heart is not flawless. The twist that floored audiences then is easier to see coming now, and the pacing luxuriates where it might have tightened. But as a sustained piece of mood, craft and doomed atmosphere it has outlived most of its 1987 neighbours, and the two-handed dance with the devil performed by Rourke and De Niro only looks better with age. A risky, gorgeous, genuinely unsettling film, and one well worth meeting again.