Hellboy

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

A wartime portal brings an infant demon to Earth, where Professor Broom adopts him. Decades later, Hellboy works with the paranormal bureau, Abe Sapien and new agent John Myers, while longing for fire-wielding Liz Sherman. Resurrected Rasputin unleashes multiplying creatures and infiltrates the bureau through Kroenen. Broom is killed. The team follows the villains to a mausoleum; Liz destroys the creatures but is captured with Hellboy and Myers. Rasputin takes her soul and demands that Hellboy open a portal to the Ogdru Jahad. Myers reminds Hellboy of Broom and his freedom to choose. Hellboy closes the portal and wounds Rasputin, whose body releases the Behemoth. Hellboy destroys it from inside with grenades, then revives Liz. Their kiss gives his chosen life an intimate expression beyond the defeated prophecy.

The central figure's appearance establishes a judgment before he has done anything. Ron Perlman's Hellboy carries the visual vocabulary of a threat while inhabiting the role of a protector, which gives the fantasy an immediate question about how identity is assigned. His body cannot become ordinary through good conduct, so acceptance has to involve something other than making him look less different. Guillermo del Toro's world makes that distinction central. A monstrous exterior does not supply a complete moral account, just as a formally respectable position does not guarantee benevolence. The story turns those familiar assumptions into a daily problem for someone whose work benefits a society that cannot easily acknowledge his place within it.

Broom supplies a different way of knowing him. John Hurt's character defines the relationship through care rather than through a use that can be extracted from an unusual body. That gives fatherhood a practical ethical force: it helps establish what Hellboy believes is possible for himself. The bond is important precisely because it has to contend with another account of his origins, one that treats his existence as a means to an end. Those competing accounts make destiny more than a large supernatural problem. It becomes a question about whose interpretation of a life is permitted to organise that life. A person can inherit circumstances without inheriting the obligation to fulfil somebody else's intention for them. Broom's place in the story gives that possibility an emotional history rather than leaving it as a final declaration.

The bureau is both a shelter and a limitation. It provides company, resources and a purpose while keeping its unusual inhabitants removed from the society they serve. A character can have a home and still feel that the home is partly an enclosure. Jeffrey Tambor's Manning and Rupert Evans's Myers occupy different relationships with that condition, giving the institutional world more than one response to Hellboy's independence. The bureau also turns supernatural work into routine, which lets the film's strange world acquire an everyday texture. Extraordinary bodies still need conversation, privacy and some say in how their time is spent. The mixture of secrecy and ordinary frustration makes the fantasy companionable without making its restrictions harmless.

Liz gives difference a more intimate difficulty. Selma Blair's character has abilities that can endanger others, making proximity something she cannot take for granted. Her relationship with Hellboy therefore involves more than attraction between two outsiders. They have to imagine a form of closeness that acknowledges risk without allowing risk to become the entire definition of either person. His jealousy complicates that task by making his desire for recognition less generous than he might like to believe. The film leaves him capable of immaturity as well as courage, which prevents the sympathetic outsider from becoming morally perfect. Wanting someone near is not the same as attending to what she needs. Their relationship makes the broader argument about chosen identity meaningful at the scale of two people trying to share a life.

Abe expands the bureau's sense of family through another kind of perception. Doug Jones's physical performance gives the amphibious figure a distinct presence, while the surrounding world allows knowledge to take unfamiliar forms. The team's different capabilities matter because cooperation need not require everyone to experience a situation in the same way. That gives the group a social as well as a tactical purpose. A creature can be strange to an outsider and entirely legible to someone who has learned how to live beside him. The film's design invites that adjustment in the viewer, making unusual forms available for affection, humour and vulnerability. The creatures become participants in a shared environment rather than merely effects waiting to demonstrate what the environment can contain.

The antagonists turn the same imagination towards control. Karel Roden's Rasputin treats an individual's future as something available for a larger purpose, making the promised destiny a demand rather than an opportunity. The occult history belongs to the comic-book fantasy, not to a factual explanation of wartime events. Its dramatic force lies in the contrast between a grand design and the particular relationships the design would erase. The film's elaborate creatures and hidden spaces make that contrast visible. Scale can be enormous while the decision remains personal: whether someone accepts the account of himself offered by power, or continues to act through an identity shaped by care and attachment. The story gives choice a cost without making origin the final authority over choice.

Hellboy's humour helps that struggle remain human in its emotional proportions. A character can carry an apocalyptic possibility while worrying about being liked, which lets large fantasy and small embarrassment coexist. The film does not require ordinary longing to become irrelevant just because extraordinary danger is present. Instead, the longing explains why preserving an ordinary future matters. This 2004 adaptation of Mike Mignola's character gives its hero a world that wants to categorise him as an instrument, then supplies relationships through which he can refuse the category. Understanding the film means following that refusal beyond the spectacle. Its chosen family gives the supernatural adventure a durable centre: a person becomes more than his assigned purpose through the people he cares about and the decisions he makes beside them.