Hors Satan (2011)
Directed by Bruno Dumont

Film Review

Following on from his previous film, Hadewijch (2009), an agnostic's assault on the failings of modern religion, director Bruno Dumont stays with the spiritual theme and risks further censure as he delivers his most controversial commentary on Christian mythology to date. Hors Satan not only questions the most fundamental tenets of Christianity (or indeed any religion) by challenging their moral basis, it goes much deeper and compels us to reflect on the most basic question: what is it about the human psyche that makes faith, an unquestioning belief in the unknowable, so necessary?   Dumont's denial of the existence of an all-powerful, all-seeing deity is as apparent here as it is in any of his previous films; the particular concerns he expresses in Hors Satan are to do with the origins of faith and the power it has to transform our lives, for good or for ill.  Essential to any religion is an acceptance of moral certainties.  By blurring the boundary between good and evil to the extent that it becomes impossible to distinguish one from the other (murder is wrong, yet the killing of a rapist is somehow justified), Dumont's film exposes the fallacy of any belief system that relies so unequivocally on absolutes, and the impression we are left with is that none of the established religions is up to the job of serving our present spiritual and moral needs.

Hors Satan is a film of such cold, blistering austerity that it chills the senses and troubles the heart to watch it.  There is no music to guide our emotions, and there is virtually no dialogue.  The soundtrack is dominated by the unremitting sound of the wind blowing across a bleak rural landscape, the eerie howling of demonic forces trying to gain purchase on our world. Yet for all its glacial detachment, the film is one that is suffused with a raw, inexpressible beauty.  The unblemished picturesque setting (the Côte d'Opale on the Atlantic coast of northern France) lends a mystical, timeless quality that makes it easier for the spectator to accept some of the film's more fantastic episodes (miracles that are twisted versions of those recounted in the gospels of the New Testament).  Watching Hors Satan is an unsettling experience, a kind of half-waking dream in which you feel you are the subject of a frenzied medieval exorcism.

The film's beginning immediately calls to mind the famous sequence in Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955) where a madman wanders across a rural wilderness loudly professing that he is the Son of God.  The only difference is that in Dumont's film the lone madman is genuinely alone, in a world where no one else believes in anything and God is truly dead.  More than Dreyer, the film's main influence is Robert Bresson, a maverick cineaste who pushed filmmaking technique and storytelling to the very limits of austere minimalism, in an attempt to get at the fundamental truths of human experience.  In Hors Satan, Dumont proves himself to be a worth disciple of Bresson, even though his perspective on faith and religion could hardly be more different. Like Bresson, he chose non-professional actors for the lead roles (David Dewaele and Alexandra Lematre) and insisted that they refrain from displaying external emotions in their performances.   The film's two protagonists - an unnamed itinerant miracle worker and his devoted Goth acolyte - haunt the landscape like two lost souls who cannot quite make up their minds whether they are the central characters in a Brontë novel or stray extras in a Hammer horror film.  Is it love or a shared communion with Divine forces that binds the two characters to one another and gives their life meaning, when all around them is a dead, faithless void?  We cannot be sure - given the choice between the mystique of the abstract and the shallow thrill of cold certainty, Dumont will always go for the former.
 
Hors Satan has been compared, often unfavourably, with Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life (2011).  Whilst the two films address the same spiritual concerns, they are a world apart in their approaches, and Dumont's film has none of the cinematic artifice that makes Malick's so easy to engage with.  Of the two films, Dumont's is the more profound and original, the one true eye-opener.  It takes us on a journey that, once experienced, is unlikely to be forgotten, one that forces us to see things within ourselves that we could never have expected.  The film's languorous pace, narrative sparsity and brutal ransacking of Christian iconography will doubtless prevent it from achieving the acclaim, let alone the audience, that it deserves.  But it is undoubtedly one of the most inspired meditations on man's yearning for the Divine that cinema has so far given us, a film of exceptional daring, insight and subtlety.

Film Synopsis

On the northern coast of France, between the marshes and the sand dunes, there lives a strange man who ekes out an existence like something from another century.  He poaches all that he needs to eat and warms himself with a fire that he makes with his bare hands.  No one knows who he is or where has come from.  But he has a mission.  He is here to expel evil from a village that is haunted by the Devil himself...