The Soul Eater (2024)

Score: 4.5 / 5

Roquenoix, a secluded French town plagued by parallel strings of brutal, senseless murders and missing children, is haunted by the local legend of The Soul Eater, a being said to invade the minds of his victims and corrupt them into committing horrific violence. The latest act of violence: a young husband and wife stab each other to death in the kitchen after making a beautiful brunch while evidently not fighting, not attempting to defend themselves, and while sexually climaxing. As the police lock down the scene and attempt to locate the couple's adolescent son, experts are called in to assess the scene, determine the cause of the homicides, and find the missing child.

That's where the film really starts: a detective, while running and yelling angrily, receives his orders. He hitchhikes to Roquenoix, meeting a Parisian police chief along the way who picks him up reluctantly. An unbalanced gender dynamic plays out as they take each other in, she questioning why he's in plainclothes and hiking and he brusquely focusing on the missing children cases he's investigating. When they end up arriving to the same address for their work, they put two and two together and realize the cases are linked.

The two actors, Virginie Ledoyen and Paul Hamy are really wonderful in the film, which wisely centers on their relationship. Like the best detective thrillers, The Soul Eater focuses on its characters and the effect horrific crimes have on them; this film reminded me at times of Se7en, Prisoners, Antlers, The Pale Blue Eye, and True Detective. Not necessarily conscious homages, but similar "vibes" as the kids say, through a contemplative and heightened thematic approach to a semi-supernatural-seeming mystery. Hamy is quite nice to look at, and performs bravado despite wearing a big anxious secret on his sleeve; Ledoyen looks like a cross between Geena Davis and Natalie Portman, but her bravery and stoic desperation to command a room reminded me a lot of Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs. Their backstories will be slowly explored via piecemeal flashbacks at key intervals, and they've got some significant baggage. Their slightly awkward pairing allows for mutual trust to develop, not unlike early encounters between Mulder and Scully. But just when you think the screenplay is going to rely on archetypal differences to dictate their characterizations, it swerves the opposite direction.

I was gasping for breath for most of this screening. Rarely do mysteries thrill me anymore, especially ones masquerading as police procedurals, and I wasn't expecting much from a French movie about which I had heard and seen nothing. For most of its runtime, the screenplay creates even more frayed edges and offers more clues, many of which are disparate and bizarre. You start wondering how they could possibly tie together into a cohesive strand, or if this will remain an abstract secret, something unknowable and endlessly subject to speculation, like Twin Peaks or a Kubrick film. But by the finale -- and I won't spoil it here, because this is a rare occasion when discovering the plot on your own is absolutely essential -- the whole thing neatly concludes with no doubt or loose ends or unwelcome red herrings.

More should be said about this film, as it touches on far more than can be examined in one brief review. Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury came to prominence with the excellent and horrifying Inside in 2007, followed by Livid, Among the Living, and even an entry in the Texas Chainsaw franchise, a prequel to the original film, titled Leatherface in 2017. Most recently, they helmed a disappointing but noteworthy haunted house film shot almost entirely underwater in The Deep House (2021). The Soul Eater is possibly my favorite of their work thus far, because it suggests both restraint and a measured, thoughtful approach to earned, emotionally taxing mystery. Gorgeous cinematography highlights the isolation of this ghostly hamlet, haunted as much by a spook in the forest as by its own rotting economy and crumbling morale. The fictional town is facing extinction, long after its sanatorium had been shuttered, cutting off business and money and decimating the population, adding questions of mental illness and financial desperation to the suspicious townsfolk. Material needs and metaphysical fears coalesce into a heady cocktail; had this been filmed in America, I imagine its setting as deep in a murky bayou, but the rural French foothills add a sickly damp chill to the proceedings. This isn't a horror film with scares, but its dramatization of perverse desperation bothered me late into the night and for days after.