Detective fiction has deep roots in Gothic horror — look no further than Poe’s seminal “Murders in the Rue Morgue” for confirmation. Horror has expanded on this genre interplay for centuries of literature and film, from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles to Thomas Harris’ Hannibal novels, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s dread-soaked Cure (1997), and beyond. Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury continue in this tradition with The Soul Eater, a work of procedural folk horror. The directorial duo might be most famous for Inside (2007), their exuberantly violent contribution to the New French Extremity, but over the past couple decades they have surveyed horror in various shades and permutations. From the dark fairy tale Livid (2011) to the coming-of-age slasher Among the Living (2014) and the grisly Southern Gothic Leatherface (2017), Bustillo and Maury’s oeuvre displays expansive respect for the horror genre.
The Soul Eater stays true to the pair’s career-long allegiances. Based on a 2021 novel by Alexis Laipsker, the plot follows two investigators — Commander Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen) and Captain of the Gendarmerie Franck de Rolan (Paul Hamy) — who are dispatched to the French mountain village of Roquenoir to work what initially seem to be two separate cases: Guardiano is tasked with solving a married couple’s monstrous murder-suicide, while de Rolan tries to locate several missing children.
The film prowls inexorably into the shadowy halls of horror as connections between these cases unfold. Guardiano discovers that the mutilated husband and wife experienced orgasm as they died, eating chunks of each other’s flesh and stabbing each other with kitchen utensils, like something out of a Clive Barker or Poppy Z. Brite story. She and de Rolan both learn of a local legend about the soul eater: a creature that lives in the forest, luring passersby and extracting their souls before sending them home to commit atrocious crimes.
Like much of Bustillo and Maury’s work, The Soul Eater wears its influences proudly. There’s more than a little of Stephen King’s It in the notion of a village losing its children to an ancient evil force, and there’s also plenty of The Wicker Man (1973) in the concept of hapless law enforcement agents entering a small, conspiratorial community.
Where Bustillo and Maury succeed is in refusing to indulge the fashionable pretensions of “elevated horror” (a smoke-and-mirrors artifice that filmmakers usually use to disguise their own genre ignorance or narratological ineptness). The Soul Eater’s directorial duo also evades irony in all their extratextuality. Their filmography has consistently demonstrated an innate respect for horror and an unapologetic interest in the genre’s most grotesque, nihilistic possibilities. The Soul Eater is no exception.
The duo’s latest is formally lean and unfussy, offering modest flourishes in aerial drone footage and selectively deployed anamorphic lens shots. Most compelling is its folkloric engagement with the visual motif of wood: log cabins, wood-carved effigies, a sawmill suicide, and even a quiet nod to Final Destination 2’s (2003) infamous log truck opening.
But The Soul Eater is also not perfect. A key scene of emotional disclosure between the investigators falls flat, and the film sometimes struggles to balance its difficult tone. Overall, though, it’s an elegantly rendered horror procedural with a staid, subtle performance by Ledoyen at its center. Bustillo and Maury have demonstrated once again that horror contains multitudes, and it doesn’t need to play arthouse dress-up to indicate as much. Horror’s philosophical and aesthetic merits have always already been there: all one needs to do is look.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2024 — Dispatch 2.
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