Mangeur d’Âmes
*½/****
starring Virginie Ledoyen, Sandrine Bonnaire, Paul Hamy, Cameron Bain
written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre
directed by Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo
by Walter Chaw Alexander Bustillo and Julien Maury’s first film, 2007’s Inside, is a prominent member of the brief but incandescent French New Extremity movement, and so fucking good it reverberates still, 17 years later, showing up in the fetus reaction shots of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part Two and contributing to the slight feeling of dread I’ve come to feel about changing lightbulbs and getting into fender-benders. Inside‘s stylishness, lawlessness, and formal gamesmanship left such a mark on me that I found an all-region release of Bustillo and Maury’s follow-up, Livid, before it secured an American release and did the same thing again with Among the Living. Neither was as good as Inside, but both were slick enough to suggest there might be more live rounds in the barrel. I was thrilled when they landed a prequel to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Leatherface, and disappointed when it failed to push any boundaries–a running theme, as it turns out, for their follow-ups: the monster film Kandisha and the underwater haunted-house flick The Deep House. They’re still promising filmmakers, but after setting the world on fire, their work has lacked danger and urgency.
Their latest, The Soul Eater, is a folk horror/procedural that reminds of Erik Skjoldbjaerg’s Insomnia or Billie August’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow or, perhaps closer to the point, Tomas Alfredson’s The Snowman. In its protracted conclusion, the picture switches gears suddenly to turgid riffs on Se7en and, of all things, Sympathy for Lady Vengeance. Set in the small, picaresque village of Roquenoir in the French Alps, it follows the investigation of dour detective Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen) and scruffy gendarme Franck de Rolan (Paul Hamy). Elizabeth is trying to figure out a series of murder-suicides wherein both parties appear to be equally culpable, and Franck is on the trail of several missing children in the area. Lo, their separate cases turn out to be one and the same, meaning this odd couple who don’t much like each other now have to work together. Complicating things is little Evan (Cameron Bain), a survivor of his parents’ grisly deaths who’s currently lying in a hospital bed, whispering about a creature called “The Soul Eater” he believes has harvested his mom and dad. A comely mortician (Wendy Grenier) informs Elizabeth that his parents achieved mutual orgasm before dying in the midst of stabbing each other around 130 times between them. There’s a little bit of the author Graham Masterton in these moments; had I not seen Bustillo and Maury already fumble their Texas Chain Saw reboot, I would have thought them ideal to adapt him. I don’t know what happened, exactly, but every film of theirs after Inside, The Soul Eater included, seems…timid. Are they hoping to become mainstream filmmakers of middling dreck? Mission accomplished. I want to make something of how the French term for “orgasm” means “the little death,” but, like the rest of The Soul Eater, there isn’t any there there, either.
Consider the scene about halfway through where Elizabeth, in the tabernacle of a creepy old church, finds a book of scary illustrations that tell all about the monster in question. Face set and stern, reading the pages aloud for some reason, she recites: “For the monster to die, man must perish. Summon the clemency of Heaven and its merciless justice, for only tears of salt will stave off the appetite of the soul eater.” If this were a classic Infocom text game, one would scour this passage for keys to eventually triumphing over said “soul eater.” For the purposes of The Soul Eater, it’s just grave-sounding mumbo-jumbo horseshit written to sound spooky–and maybe it does in the original French, though any spookiness has been fully lost in translation. A priest (Stéphane Dausse) appears over Elizabeth’s shoulder–in a possible failed attempt at a jump scare–to intone more garbage about how time flies but legends persist. Then he drops an expository suppository, asking, “Do you think someone local could be the soul eater?” The priest suddenly becomes a suspect when she challenges his vow of discretion in the confessional, which is a pretty good illustration of how the elegance Bustillo and Maury brought to their early work has given way to clunky contrivance. Things don’t really pick up until an extended flashback of Evan’s parents getting their rocks off in an extreme BDSM tussle, and there’s some good shit involving an axe, but it’s too late to save the piece, especially since The Soul Eater keeps thwarting its late momentum with long, tensionless scenes that wrap up the plot in distended but tidy bows. I will say that Simon Roca’s cinematography is handsome (and I would watch Ledoyen read the phone book, especially in French), but Demian Regna is eating the filmmakers’ lunch on the regular now, so it’s time to cut the shit.
