Roland Voight’s dark journey in Hellraiser 2022 is a scintillating depiction of how one man’s reward is another man’s curse. In its opening scenes, the movie establishes that even though Voight is a millionaire and possesses almost everything one can ask for, he has fallen prey to the wicked schemes of the Hellraiser franchise’s iconic Cenobites. Hoping to find pleasure, he sacrifices a young man to the puzzle box just to complete its last configuration. With what follows, he earns the Liminal (Sensation) reward he craves from the Cenobites, but it all comes with a hefty cost.
After setting up the stage for its primary characters, Hellraiser 2022 shows Roland Voight’s return, but this time as a changed man. It turns out that the Liminal configuration is not what he had expected it to be, and what is supposed to be pleasurable for the Cenobites actually spells endless pain for him. Realizing that choosing the Liminal configuration was a mistake, Voight digs deeper into his own grave in Hulu’s Hellraiser reboot when he sets out to complete the puzzle box again and seek another boon from the Cenobites.
Roland’s Original Liminal Reward In Hellraiser 2022 Explained
When given a choice between Lament (Life), Lore (Knowledge), Lauderant (Love), Liminal (Sensation), Lazarus (Resurrection), and Leviathan (Power), Voight asks for Liminal (Sensation) in the hope that he will be granted pleasure for the rest of his life, unaware that pleasure is synonymous with excruciating pain for the Cenobites. As such, they grant him his boon by installing a contraption on his chest that keeps pulling on his nerves without killing him. This reward puts Voight through extreme agony and makes every second worth a lifetime of misery.
Despite realizing that the Cenobites always give a skewed version of what they promise, Voight decides to complete Hellraiser‘s central puzzle box again. Since he cannot function as he used to with his contraption, he pays Riley’s boyfriend, Trevor, to find human sacrifices for the puzzle. When he later comes out of hiding to reveal his grand plan to Riley, it becomes evident that his endless suffering from the Liminal reward has almost blinded him, and even though he is well aware of the Cenobites’ sinister motives, he cannot live without undoing the biggest blunder of his past.
Why Roland Voight Chose The Leviathan Power Reward
Voight manages to complete the puzzle box for the second time, and as a result, gets the opportunity to choose another boon. When the Priest shows up to grant him his new reward, he asks her to undo his first choice and take back his chest contraption. To his dismay, Jamie Clayton’s Priest refuses to do grant his wish and tells him that “there is no retreat when a threshold has been crossed,” which means that his previous reward can only be replaced with a new one. Desperate to end his pain, Roland Voight settles for Leviathan (Power) because he presumes that it will give him some form of control and authority over his current helpless situation. To some degree, the Priest also takes his helplessness for granted and convinces him to choose power when he claims that anything would be better than enduring the constant pain of the Liminal configuration.
What Happened To Roland After His Second Hellraiser 2022 Reward
After the Hellraiser‘s primary villain, the Priest (aka Pinhead) grants Roland the Leviathan configuration, his chest contraption breaks down and falls to the ground, leaving a gaping hole in his torso. By magic, the hole heals by itself, and for a fleeting moment, Voight is a normal human again. However, soon after, a colossal chain shoots out of the ceiling of his mansion and pierces his healed chest. The chain then pulls him into what seems like the Cenobite realm. In Hellraiser‘s closing scenes, Roland Voight gets flayed and needled by a powerful force that ultimately turns him into a Cenobite.
The Hulu horror movie’s climax establishes that after choosing the Leviathon configuration as his second reward, Roland Voight has lost everything that makes him human. Hellraiser 2022’s ending is symbolic in this regard, because Roland’s journey toward finding pleasure and then suffering from its consequential pain parallels Riley’s own arc. Like Voight, she, too, initially struggles to battle the long-term consequences of short-term pleasures from drug addiction. By depicting Roland’s transformation into an extradimensional being and Riley’s acceptance of the agony that comes with living as a human, Hellraiser draws an intriguing allegory for the dichotomy of choice that makes or breaks a person’s moral compass.
