This breathtaking cinematic allegory explores the devastation of mining in China through the poetic framework of Dante’s Inferno. Director Zhao Liang takes us on a mesmerizing journey to Inner Mongolia, where trucks and explosions transform rolling fields into a bleak landscape of ashen pits and dust clouds. From there, we make the deep descent into dimly lit mines that echo with eerie sounds of screeching and scraping, then continue on to the fiery pit of an ironworks where molten metal fills the air with a hellish orange glow. Behemoth shifts hypnotically from these nightmarish environments to intimate moments at home with workers—we witness as they quietly eat meals and scrub the inky makeup of coal dust off their bodies after a day’s labor. With force and fury, Liang makes the environmental and human wreckage of China’s industrialization disturbingly clear. By the film’s searing ending, we’re compelled to ask whether the destruction we’ve witnessed in the name of progress serves any purpose at all.  EM