The Soul Eater (2024)


Adapted from Alexis Laipsker’s novel, and written by Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre, The Soul Eater is the latest offering from Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who burst onto the scene with the infamous Inside (2007), a major title in the New French Extremity wave at the turn of the 21st century. Their work since, including blistering titles such as Livid (2011), Among the Living (2014) and The Deep House (2021), has demonstrated their willingness to push boundaries and step outside of convention. Theirs is a wholly distinctive approach to genre.

Part gripping police procedural, part Gallic Gothic shocker - with shadowy traces of Folk Horror present in some striking imagery - The Soul Eater follows two detectives who are sent to the sleepy French mountain town of Roquenoir. Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen), an inspector in the National Police, is investigating a series of gruesome murder-suicides, and Franck de Rolan (Paul Hamy), a cop from the other French police service, the National Gendarmerie, is searching for several missing local children. Before long, the pair realise their cases are connected by whispers of an old folk tale about a malevolent creature: a terrifying demonic incarnation known as the Soul Eater.

With its troubling central mystery, deeply brooding, rural Gothic atmosphere, hostile, secretive locals, and haunted protagonists who seem trapped in a downward spiral into hopelessness, The Soul Eater is a compelling and deeply unsettling trip. Like much of the previous work of Bustillo and Maury, there is a strong emotional core with believable, flawed characters on a journey into absolute darkness, and an extreme, unflinching approach to depictions of violence and human depravity. A series of increasingly ominous twists thrusts the story into ever disturbing territory, and us along with it. When Elizabeth learns of the local legend of the Soul Eater, told to her by a traumatised young boy she finds hiding at the scene of his parents’ murder-suicide, the police procedural narrative seems poised to lurch into supernatural fantasy horror. However, the screenplay never goes where we expect, and keeps us on our toes and the edge of our seat, with its shoals of red-herrings and several further coiling twists.

The pair’s investigation leads them to an abandoned, secret-filled hotel, the closure of which sent the town’s population into decline. They encounter a lot of resistance from residents and police. Are the local police incompetent, or deliberately obstructing the investigations? The mayor also appears to harbour resentment towards the them as she believes they are not sensitive to the plight of the town. As the harried detectives, Virginie Ledoyen and Paul Hamy deliver convincing and quietly powerful performances as two characters who have more in common than either would care to admit. Both have dark pasts touched by tragedy and both seem to be motivated by more than just solving the cases. The third act presents some out of nowhere twists, but the direction of Bustillo and Maury, and performances of Ledoyen and Hamy, ensure proceedings lose none of the carefully crafted tension.

A searing, unsettling and brutally violent tale of grief, loss and corrupted innocence, which morphs and shifts and twists and turns all the way to its shocking, bloodily cathartic denouement.

The Soul Eater screened at Glasgow FrightFest on Friday 8th March.

Popular posts from this blog

Whistle and I’ll Come to You (2010)

Image
Dir. Andy de Emmony After placing his senile wife in a care home, retired astronomer James Parkin (John Hurt) heads for the coast to revisit their ‘old haunts’, including the now out-of-season hotel they honeymooned in. By day he is stalked along the windswept beaches by a spectral figure dressed in white, and by night he is terrorised by strange sounds and someone, or something, attempting to enter his room… In the 2000s BBC4 attempted to reignite the old Ghost Story at Christmas tradition by adapting MR James’s A View from a Hill (2005) and Number 13 (2006). This series was seemingly short lived though, as their next outing wasn’t until 2010, and an unusual reinterpretation of James’s classic chiller Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad . While de Emmony’s direction captures the atmosphere and tone of James very well, this film differs significantly from other adaptations, including Jonathan Miller’s supremely unsettling 1968 take . Neil Cross’s screenplay only incorpo...
Read more

Halloween: Resurrection

Image
2002 Dir. Rick Rosenthal Four years after mistakenly killing a man she thought to be her brother (really, Dimension Films? Really ?), long-suffering Laurie Strode is eventually hunted down by her not really dead actual brother, crazier-than-bat-shit Michael Myers, and murderlised. Making his way back home to Haddonfield, Myers discovers the crew of an online reality show has taken over his house (!) to broadcast a Halloween special featuring a group of dumb-fuck teenagers dared to spend the night in the house of ill-repute. Naturally he goes on yet another killing spree. And it's all caught on camera and broadcast online for other dumb-fuck teenagers to watch. Yes, all of this actually really happens. It really fucking happens. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later did not warrant a sequel. It was intended not only as a twentieth anniversary celebration of John Carpenter's classic chiller , but as a way to draw the series to a close, with its original heroine finally co...
Read more

Caveat (2020)

Image
Isaac, a brooding drifter suffering from memory loss, agrees to look after Olga, the niece of his acquaintance Moe. A troubled woman prone to bouts of catatonia, Olga lives in an old, ramshackle house on an isolated island in the middle of a dark lake. Isaac agrees to wear a chained harness that prevents him from going into certain rooms. He gradually comes to learn of the unsettling history of the house and the unquiet dead it harbours within its walls... Written and directed by Damian McCarthy,  Caveat  is steeped in the Gothic tradition. With distinct echoes of the work of Edgar Allan Poe, it is ripe with a lingering atmosphere of morbidity and decay. McCarthy's screenplay toys with themes such as psychological rot, dark family secrets, and the aftermath of unspeakable violence and cruelty. The story unfolds within the creepy confines of the lonely, mouldy house, with myriad forbidden rooms, hidden passageways and concealed bloody secrets. The house itself is cut off from c...
Read more