Hors Satan (2013)
Average Rating: 6.3/10
Reviews Counted: 34
Fresh: 26 | Rotten: 8
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.2/10
Critic Reviews: 8
Fresh: 5 | Rotten: 3
No consensus yet.
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Average Rating: 3.2/5
User Ratings: 415
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Movie Info
Angel or devil, good or evil, Christ or Satan: These are the mystical questions revolving around the nameless figure living in the coastal dunes outside of a small French town. Named one of the top ten films of the year by Cahiers du Cinema and an official selection of the Cannes Film Festival, Hors Satan is a provocative parable of identity, morality, and human relationships, defying notions of genre to become a mesmerizing and haunting original. -- (C) New Yorker Films -- (C) New Yorker Films
Jan 18, 2013 Limited
New Yorker Films
- Official Site
Cast
-
David Dewaele
Le Gars -
Alexandre Lematre
la fille -
Valerie Mestdagh
la mère -
Sonia Barthelemy
la mère de la gamine -
Juliette Bacquet
la gamine -
Christophe Bon
le garde -
Dominique Caffier
l'homme au chien -
Aurore Broutin
la routarde
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All Critics (34) | Top Critics (8) | Fresh (26) | Rotten (8)
Inarticulate characters, long blank stares, forced camera angles and allegorical nonsense make up this pretentious study in quasi-religious ennui.
Top CriticMaddening, pretentious, hypnotic and transcendent in roughly equal measure.
Despite its pictorial intensity and the extremity of some of its scenes, the film proceeds in a mood of detachment, turning the suffering physical beings under its scrutiny into abstractions.
Hors Satan is stark, strange and uncompromisingly personal. It's also vivid and unforgettable.
Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.
Ultimately less an arty provocation than a secular invocation, Outside Satan seems almost helplessly exploratory, an honest account of groping for grace.
God works in strange ways, especially when Bruno Dumont directs him. Or is that the devil?
The ambiguity of the episodic story with its sparse dialog, combined with the visually stunning landscape photography, makes "Hors Satan" a compelling, if overly long, composition.
"Hors Satan" could be grouped with Carlos Reygadas' "Silent Light" (itself based on Dreyer's "Ordet") and the films of Robert Bresson, but his minimalism makes his meaning more elusive, inviting less emotion than those filmmakers.
It's difficult to feel transported by the impossible when the film's world is already so clearly governed by the arbitrary.
Controversial yet meditative French drama makes inscrutability its raison d'etre.
As its title suggests, Satan grapples with the existence and nature of evil in the world, but it's hard to take such weighty matters seriously when they're explored with all the subtlety and grace of an anti-abortion pamphlet.
Provocative French filmmaker Dumont pushes boundaries even further with an astonishing approach to the Christian narrative (the title translates as Outside Satan), mixing the sacred and profane to shake up audiences and get us thinking.
The problem with "Outside Satan" is that the filmmaker has remained faithful to expectations without enlivening them.
Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.
[Dumont's] sixth film and perhaps his most compelling ...
The film develops a powerful hold on the watcher as it progresses. But beware, it takes you on the weirdest of metaphysical journeys.
It is hard to be certain who the characters are, where they come from and how they know each other.
Audience Reviews for Hors Satan
Super Reviewer
Last year Dumont left his comfort zone with 'Hadewijch' a Paris set tale of religious fanaticism. It was his most mainstream work yet, following what was basically a straight narrative. His latest sees him return to his usual milieu of unattractive faces set against the grim backdrop of Northern France. It's self-indulgent garbage, consisting mainly of our protagonists walking across wind-swept fields. As is the norm for modern French cinema, it's filled with violence, though not as graphic as the work of most of Dumont's contemporaries. The movie is not only grim to look at, but rough on the ears too, thanks to Dumont's insistence on naturally recorded sound.
Bizarrely, 'Hors Satan' shares a silly sight gag (a character pulled back comically by a wire after being shot) with 'Django Unchained'. It seems Tarantino saw this at Cannes last year.
Super Reviewer
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Foreign Titles
- Outside Satan (Hors Satan) (DE)
- Outside Satan (Hors Satan) (UK)
Last year Dumont left his comfort zone with 'Hadewijch' a Paris set tale of religious fanaticism. It was his most mainstream work yet, following what was basically a straight narrative. His latest sees him return to his usual milieu of unattractive faces set against the grim backdrop of Northern France. It's self-indulgent garbage, consisting mainly of our protagonists walking across wind-swept fields. As is the norm for modern French cinema, it's filled with violence, though not as graphic as the work of most of Dumont's contemporaries. The movie is not only grim to look at, but rough on the ears too, thanks to Dumont's insistence on naturally recorded sound.
Bizarrely, 'Hors Satan' shares a silly sight gag (a character pulled back comically by a wire after being shot) with 'Django Unchained'. It seems Tarantino saw this at Cannes last year.