About halfway through Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, I felt like I had truly ascended. Ludwig Göransson‘s sparse, organic score had suddenly adopted synths and an ominous, yet addictive beat. Matt Damon‘s Odysseus was leading his unhappy few, his surviving band of brothers, across a bleak, black sand-covered landscape. The blood of two rams was offered as sacrifice for the gods and suddenly the shades of the souls already gone began to rise from the dirt to haunt the living.

The Odyssey had gone to hell.

Hades is the Greek name for hell and for its enigmatic ruling god. It’s been depicted many ways over the years on the screen, but Nolan’s version felt the most metal to me. We don’t see Odysseus and his men descend into any shadowy, flame-filled cave. Rather, it’s the dead who ascend into our world, bringing with them news from hell.

Just as in Homer’s epic poem, Odysseus needs to make this side quest to seek the advice of the blind prophet Tiresias (James Remar) to discover the way home. And, as in the original text, Odysseus gets to catch up with the spirits of his fallen Trojan war comrades. Nolan throws a twist in his version, though, opting for Odysseus to contend with the bitterly angry soul of Sinon (Elliot Page) instead of the legendary Achilles. (Sinon doesn’t appear in Odyssey, but is part of Roman poet Virgil’s epic told from the Trojan side, The Aeneid.) But one thing that Christopher Nolan does not change from Homer — but also, in fact, elegantly expands upon — is Odysseus’s conversation with the fallen king Agamemnon (Benny Safdie).

Tales of the Greek heroes who fought in the Trojan War have been explored in poems, myths, plays, and songs for literal millennia. While Homer’s Odyssey lets Agamemnon stew about his own murder to Odysseus, Nolan shuffles in details from other sources, specifically Aeschylus’s The Oresteia, to add additional pathos to these short, but weighty, scenes detailing Clytemnestra’s (Lupita Nyong’o) violent revenge upon her husband.

Who is Clytemnestra in The Odyssey? Why Did She Kill Her Husband, Agamemnon?

In case, you didn’t quite catch it, we learn that one reason why Odysseus is loathe to resist Agamemnon’s call to war is that the Mycenaean king already went so far as to sacrifice his own daughter Iphigenia to the gods to ensure the army got the fair winds it needed to sail to Troy. In most retellings of this story, Agamemnon tricks Clytemnestra into this scheme by suggesting she and the girl have to meet the army so the princess can marry Achilles, the greatest warrior alive. Only when she arrives for her wedding, it’s actually a ritualistic killing. In Odysseus’s retelling, we see Nyong’o’s Clytemnestra cry out in horror.

According to Agamemnon, he arrived home shortly after the war ended and Clytemnestra gave him a happy, hero’s welcome. She got him out of his exoskeleton-like armor and bathed him herself, anointing him with oil, getting him “soft” and exposed. Then, immediately after getting him into bed, she murdered him.

Agamemnon tells Odysseus all this as a warning to not return to Ithaca assuming a warm welcome home. Later, Menelaus (Jon Bernthal) catches Telemachus (Tom Holland) up on the story, offering yet another point of contrast between the royal families of Mycenae and Ithaca: Clytemnestra was then also murdered by her and Agamemnon’s son, Orestes*.

That Christopher Nolan manages to convey the tragic horror of this complex legend in just a handful of minutes — if that! — speaks to his genius as a storytelling. That he does all this while also juggling the eerie horror of his truly inventive take on Hades is a miracle. As both a classics nerd and cinephile, the Hades section of The Odyssey is peak art: simultaneously epic and intimate, and completely timeless.

*The Oresteia actually ends with the goddess Athena breaking this cycle of vigilante justice by creating legal trials, thereby appeasing the Furies, but those plays would be written approximately 700 years after Homer’s Odyssey, reflecting the values of Ancient Athens vs. the Bronze Age’s cry for incessant vengeance.