Hors Satan - review

The story of an avenging angel develops a powerful hold on the watcher along the weirdest of metaphysical journeys
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4 January 2013

French director Bruno Dumont is the kind of film-maker you either love or hate. From his multi-awarded first two films, La Vie de Jésus and L’Humanité, through to Flandres and Hadewijch, his later work, he occupies a special place reserved for those who scandalise and amaze, sometimes at the same time.

Hors Satan follows an unnamed and mostly silent vagabond (David Dewaele) as he travels across northern France. Befriended by a young girl (Alexandra Lemaître) with an abusive stepfather, he shoots the culprit and then kills a predatory park ranger.

He seems to be an avenging angel who also has the power to heal the sick and even raise people from the dead. He is, in short, a synthesis of good and evil with an imposing presence, a penetrating stare and few words. All we know is that he somehow unnerves everyone he meets as he wanders the countryside like some latter-day quasi-hippy prophet.

The film, beautifully shot in the area of France that is Dumont’s home, has little of his usual physical frankness and violence and is clearly his most overtly symbolic to date. There is no music and only direct sound is used throughout.

A critic has written of the avowedly atheist director’s “berserk spirituality” and it doesn’t take much of a cynic to agree when a stray backpacker is so transported by sex with our strange hero that she foams at the mouth. Yet the film develops a powerful hold on the watcher as it progresses. But beware, it takes you on the weirdest of metaphysical journeys.

Cert 15, 103 mins

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