The Soul Eater

by Hope Madden

There’s a handful of filmmakers who raise anticipation with each new film. For horror fans, Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury have perched gruesomely within that prized group since their 2007 feature debut, Inside.

2021’s Kandisha was another highlight in a slew of genre films, all boundary pushers, all gorgeously shot, all benefitting from flawed characters in the grimmest of circumstances making tough, often unusual decisions.

Like Elisabeth (Virginie Ledoyen) and Franck (Paul Hamy), both working the same case—unwillingly paired as it seems a murder/suicide connects two separate cases—in a remote mountain village in France.

A married couple potentially implicated in the disappearance of a dozen children has brutally killed each other, each cannibalizing the other and reaching sexual climax before finally expiring. It’s a weird case, grisly, and for each investigator it triggers a painful past.

What the filmmakers conjure—working from a script by first time screenwriters Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre and Alexis Laipsker—is a pervasive paranoia that allows superstitious nonsense to look like logic. It’s a bit of a magic trick, and they pull it off by developing a sense of place that never condescends but uses outsiders’ eyes to see the creepy that’s accepted as natural by locals.

This atmosphere feeds a childlike logic that colors the film, appropriate because so many of the primary characters are children. These bruised souls give the thriller a melancholy darkness that’s hard to shake.

And The Soul Eater is more twisty thriller than the outright horror of the pair’s previous films. Though there’s carnage, blood, and a dark and thrilling finale, the true horror of the story echoes around every sad face and suspicious glance. The imagery is haunting, allowing the film to transcend its police procedural structure to become something more mysterious and troubling.