The Big Picture
- Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury step away from their horror-first roots.
- Achieves a sustainable level of procedural thrills.
- Lacks a bit of narrative tightness, but still succeeds as a suspenseful mystery.
Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury have driven cinematic daggers into our hearts for over a decade. Whether you point at Inside, Livid, Among the Living, etcetera, the duo conceptualizes from a well of prolific darkness. Their latest feature, The Soul Eater, doesn’t lack any of that signature gut-shredding terribleness. It’s the least horror-forward of their catalog thus far, yet even so, blends unsettling folkloric imagery into a procedural thriller that’s not quite Longlegs or Megalomaniac, but will still leave your soul wounded and rotten by the time the credits roll.
What Is ‘The Soul Eater’ About?
Two out-of-town investigators find themselves unlikely partners in the remote French mountain town of Roquenoir. Commander Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen) and Captain of the Gendarmerie Franck De Rolan (Paul Hamy) butt heads early, creating a minor rivalry as they chase their own instincts. As Roquenoir’s sleepy facade gives way to more sinister discoveries, Guardiano and De Rolan realize that cooperation will get them much further. Townsfolk speak of an old urban legend about “The Soul Eater,” shrouding the case in supernatural mystery. Could a horned woodland entity be targeting Roquenoir’s youth?
Bustillo and Maury are at their most straightforward with The Soul Eater, closest to, but still lightyears away from the fable-like Livid. Presentations are something like The Snowman (but better) or The Treatment (but worse), maybe a little Kill List, where “horror” is played fast and loose. This is Bustillo and Maury at their most grounded, feeding off the frightening deviance of everyday society. It’s a more routine exploration of inhumane atrocities than I’d expect from the New French Extremity pillars, but maybe that’s by design. Bustillo and Maury work outside their usual morbid imaginations to prove they can deliver competent genre chills without a gore-slathered bag of tricks.
However, that’s not to discredit the impactful violence that finds its way onto the screen. Guardiano and De Rolan assess crime scenes smeared with blood on every wall. Corpses are slashed, bitten, and punctured into oblivion. Bustillo and Maury use their dismal portrayals of violence to expose the severity of Roquenoir’s on-the-loose maniac, because if this is what they’re doing to adult victims, we don’t want to think about what’s become of the missing children. The Soul Eater operates like Seven in how Guardiano and De Rolan expose audiences to unsightly mutilation on the job, juxtaposed against Roquenoir’s silent-but-deadly presence. It’s when Bustillo and Maury feel at their most comfortable.
‘The Soul Eater’ Can Get a Little Lost
Alas, The Soul Eater loses itself in a tangled web of wooden totems and devilish imagery. Early glimpses of the “Soul Eater” can be a symptomatic hallucination to shock, meant to remain unclear. Background information means we distrust Guardiano and De Rolan at points, but it interferes ever-so-slightly with procedural momentum. There’s a religious undertone as Roquenoir locals continue to lash out in abhorrently ruthless ways, and while the third act’s triumphant reveal is the stuff of nightmares, conspiratorial circumstances play with coincidental weightlessness. Cinematography and other technical elements are all cleanly polished, but Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre’s screenplay — based on Alexis Laipsker’s novel The Soul Eater (aka Le mangeur d’âmes) — gets momentarily lost in its suspense-first storytelling. The look and feel of everything capture malevolence in a bottle, even if getting there through harrowing performances wraps things up too neatly.
The Soul Eater is by no means an offense to horror procedurals. Bustillo and Maury are clearly directing someone else’s script (derogatory), but they still smuggle their signature dread-shellacked brand in wherever possible. Virginie Ledoyen and Paul Hamy anchor a revolting string of murders in a ho-hum town that’s descended into insurmountable tragedy, pushing forward an investigation that never sabotages icky tension. It’s not what I was expecting from Bustillo and Maury, yet proves their talents outside prior comfort zones. Not to say there’s anything comfortable about stealing babies from wombs and vampire ballerinas — “normalcy” is a strange look on the dynamic collaborators.
REVIEW
The Soul Eater (2024)
The Soul Eater doesn’t push the limits of the horror procedural subgenre, but still succeeds as a folkloric French whodunit with a dash of hellacious imagery.
- Bustillo and Maury know how to devastate us.
- Strong core performances.
- Horror visuals are used sparingly, but impactfully.
- The third act spirals a bit out of control.
- Feels too pedestrian at times for the material.
- Never surpasses expectations.
The Soul Eater had its North American Premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival.
