Stars: Virginie Ledoyen, Paul Hamy, Sandrine Bonnaire, Francis Renaud | Written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre | Directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
Two detectives with entirely different work methods are sent to the sleepy French mountain town of Roquenoir. One is investigating a series of gruesome deaths. The other is searching for some missing local children. Soon, they realise their cases are connected… by an old folklore legend of a malevolent creature, the terrifying incarnation of the Soul Eater.
The Soul Eater is a suspenseful tale of small-town horror, very much akin to similar films set in abandoned “ghost” towns. The kinds of towns synonymous with closely guarding its secrets and a weariness of outsiders. And here the audience is very much an outsider, learning what’s happening at the same time as the film’s two protagonists – Franck and Elizabeth – which the film is very much mystery-driven.
However, once the...
Two detectives with entirely different work methods are sent to the sleepy French mountain town of Roquenoir. One is investigating a series of gruesome deaths. The other is searching for some missing local children. Soon, they realise their cases are connected… by an old folklore legend of a malevolent creature, the terrifying incarnation of the Soul Eater.
The Soul Eater is a suspenseful tale of small-town horror, very much akin to similar films set in abandoned “ghost” towns. The kinds of towns synonymous with closely guarding its secrets and a weariness of outsiders. And here the audience is very much an outsider, learning what’s happening at the same time as the film’s two protagonists – Franck and Elizabeth – which the film is very much mystery-driven.
However, once the...
- 3/11/2024
- by Phil Wheat
- Nerdly
You don’t need to have lived in the proverbial middle of nowhere to understand the kind of terror Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury’s The Soul Eater mines from the fictional Roquenoix. As shot by Simon Roca, this remote hamlet in northeastern France isn’t a ghost town so much as a burial ground where humans and buildings alike are waiting to rot. A grandiose sanatorium once towered over the tree-shrouded hills, bringing in enough cash and tourists to fill the village’s coffers. But when a motorway was built across the valley, the tourists disappeared, the sanatorium was abandoned; and the few who stayed behind were left to wrestle with an ancestral legend and a series of murders that may or may not be connected with it.
The single most terrifying thing in The Soul Eater isn’t the titular devourer, but that spectral, lifeless town where its victims are stranded.
The single most terrifying thing in The Soul Eater isn’t the titular devourer, but that spectral, lifeless town where its victims are stranded.
- 2/2/2024
- by Leonardo Goi
- The Film Stage
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