Why hell? Desire, suffering;things that didn’t end at his death. All exacerbated by souless music, tasteless food, no smells, sex with no feels, not being loved. He can’t die but can still feel physical and emotional pain. And feeling shame on top of it all that he SHOULD be happy his “life” is uncomplicated.

The hole in the wall is representative of his hope and regret; said hope is yanked away after he made it, after all that toiling.

The icey tundra was a cautionary “you don’t know what real suffering is.”

Yeah man, this is hell.

Great movie.

Guess how is Helheim in Norse mythology? A hell made of ice. So that’s your hell.

That was my first thought too -almost. In fact I’d actually thought he’d gone to a sort of hell of his own making, having ended it all previously (note the guy who also ‘ended it all’, by jumping onto the spike railings). So Andres is in a hell where one cannot taste or smell anything, a place where you cannot get drunk or enjoy sex or real love; a place where everyone is fixated upon the trivial (where every TV station shows only home improvement programmes), and one cannot be injured or die as the body just heals itself quickly and some initial suffering.

So Andres is stuck in this mundane reality as a karmic punishment for having thrown his life away first time around, and eventually he makes the same mistake again by jumping onto the rail tracks while in hell and suffers terribly before he is healed again (he first did this with finger under the blade in the office).

Being a seeker of truth at heart Andres feels the mundane of hell until it becomes unbearable and he seeks an escape, first via alcohol, and then via true love with the blonde girl at work ..until eventually he finds a glimpse of the real world -or perhaps a glimpse of a higher heaven – in the crack in the wall.

But by failing to appreciate and progress at his office job in hell to redeem his past error on earth, Andres loses that job and is demoted to a lower level in hell. And by trying to escape his current level of hell altogether, he is eventually sent to a much lower and bleaker hell, as illustrated by the cold snowstorm.

Thats how I saw it anyway