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Accept %%TYPE%% cookiesThe Soul Eater (Mangeur d'Âmes)
Directed by Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Official selection
International Film Festival Rotterdam 2024
Writer
Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre
Cast
Sandrine Bonnaire, Paul Hamy, Virginie Ledoyen
Cinematographer
Simon Roca
Editor
Baxter
contact
WTFilms
“The breadcrumbs of the film’s mysteries can be chewed on for days after this disturbing feast”– Bille Walker, DREAD CENTRAL
“A suspenseful tale of small-town horror… Proves that the duo can deliver brilliantly entertaining work whatever the subject, whatever the genre”– Phil Wheat, NERDLY
“The most successful Bustillo and Maury collaboration since LIVIDE”– Theodoor Steen, SCREEN ANARCHY
A pair of quite different investigators arrive in Roquenoir, a town in the French mountains, and wind up approaching the same case from two different directions. Commander Elisabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen, 8 FEMMES) has been sent to look into a married couple’s grisly murder, and Captain of the Gendarmerie Franck De Rolan (Paul Hamy, DESPITE THE NIGHT), from the “department of alarming disappearances,” intends to track down a group of missing children. Their missions turn out to be linked, and one of the elements tying them together is “The Soul Eater,” a local bogeyman legend intended to encourage kids not to wander off into the woods. This creature may not be a myth after all, and as strange details about that double killing come to light and more bizarre deaths occur, Guardiano and De Rolan are drawn toward discovering a shocking truth.
THE SOUL EATER is something of a change of pace for directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. As opposed to their previous films, from the modern classic INSIDE to 2021’s THE DEEP HOUSE, this is less a straight-up horror film than a morbid procedural mystery/thriller, albeit one with graphic, brutal flashpoints and significant undertones of the occult. Adapting the popular French novel by Alexis Laipsker, scriptwriters Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre deliver a series of reveals and reversals that up the tension and the stakes for its dual protagonists. Each is motivated by different personal demons that inform the driven performances by Ledoyen and Hamy, and Maury, Bustillo, and cinematographer Simon Roca elicit bleak, forbidding atmosphere both within the terrorized community and in the forests surrounding it. The emphasis is more on suspense than shock for quite a while, punctuated by direct and visceral moments of bloodshed—until a final act in which the true, tragic scope of the horror is revealed. – Michael Gingold
Showings
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