The Soul Eater

Every now and then, even at a busy festival like Fantasia 2024, one film stands out to such a degree that one knows one will never forget it. The Soul Eater begins as a murder mystery and unfolds into something that might be a monster movie of the genuinely chilling variety. Exactly where it ends up is less clear than you might think immediately after watching it. There are intentionally obscure elements in its otherwise tight plotting, and there’s an innate complexity to the folklore it engages with. Here, the material, the psychological and the supernatural are closely intertwined.

Several children have already disappeared from surrounding villages in this remote corner of Northeastern France when we arrive at the scene of a bloody murder. Is it connected? Commander Elizabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen) doesn’t think so. She’s annoyed that her work at the crime scene is being interrupted by a man whose mission is to track them down. Played by Paul Hamy, he introduces himself as Franck de Rolan, a member of the gendarmarie, but she doesn’t want to be friends. There’s a reason for her brittleness and her particular discomfort around his work, but it will take a while to reveal itself. For the meantime, she is preoccupied by what the local police have assumed was the outcome of a simple domestic argument, but which gets stranger and stranger the more closely she looks at it.

“He came,” a frightened child will whisper. “The eater of souls.” The dead couple in the house have eaten pieces of each other. A mysterious horned figure keeps turning up in odd places, most notably in the form of little wooden statuettes. Everybody knows the local legend, she and Franck are told, but it’s nothing more than a scary story used to discourage children from straying too far into the woods. Isn’t it? Though we’re a long way from its usual territory, those with an interest in folklore may notice allusions to the wendigo, a creature at its most dangerous when times are hard, and one which exerts its power not just physically but by taking possession of the mind, infesting it with unnatural appetites. One might say that it eats the soul.

Times are definitely hard in Roquenoix, as its mayor explains when she, too, is trying to forge a connection despite Elizabeth’s brusque efficiency. A new highway has diverted all the tragic that used to flow through the town, draining its economic lifeblood. It has become a ghost of itself. We see the evidence of that everywhere. Even its once famous sanitorium has closed. Now there’s a term that will make horror fans’ ears prick up – disused sanitorium, you say? In time, we will get there – but the horror it delivers runs deeper than some will be ready to deal with. They say that all those who look upon the thing in the woods will lose their souls, and that’s something that might hold true regardless of what you believe.

With these supernatural themes hovering in the background, the bulk of the film plays out as a noirish thriller, satisfying in itself. If it strays a little too close to formula, and if its leading characters seem a little too archetypal – or peculiar in what they miss – there are reasons for that. Its twists, when they emerge, have a psychological and moral weight which makes them satisfying rather than simply clever. The filmmakers do an effective job of concealing clues within a richly detailed world which sometimes offers up a bewildering surfeit of evidence and sometimes nothing useful at all. In the meantime, attentive viewers will catch other little hints and whispers which point to alternative or additional interpretations.

Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury have delivered some effective horror thrillers in the past, but this is by far their most accomplished film to date. The nastiness it puts on the screen at one point may seem unnecessarily explicit, yet reflects an understanding of what some of those watching will need to see. Elsewhere, it is what we don’t see that is most horrific. The trees whisper to one another. The sky hangs heavy and dark. There have always been monsters.