Hors Satan Reviews

God works in strange ways, especially when Bruno Dumont directs him. Or is that the devil?

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

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.

Full Review | Original Score: B-

"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.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

It's difficult to feel transported by the impossible when the film's world is already so clearly governed by the arbitrary.

Full Review

Controversial yet meditative French drama makes inscrutability its raison d'etre.

Full Review

Inarticulate characters, long blank stares, forced camera angles and allegorical nonsense make up this pretentious study in quasi-religious ennui.

Full Review

Maddening, pretentious, hypnotic and transcendent in roughly equal measure.

Full Review

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5

Hors Satan is stark, strange and uncompromisingly personal. It's also vivid and unforgettable.

Full Review

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.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

Full Review | Original Score: B+

Ultimately less an arty provocation than a secular invocation, Outside Satan seems almost helplessly exploratory, an honest account of groping for grace.

Full Review

The promise Dumont once showed has ossified into unholy shtick.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

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.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5

The problem with "Outside Satan" is that the filmmaker has remained faithful to expectations without enlivening them.

Full Review | Original Score: C+

Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4

[Dumont's] sixth film and perhaps his most compelling ...

Full Review

The film develops a powerful hold on the watcher as it progresses. But beware, it takes you on the weirdest of metaphysical journeys.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5

It is hard to be certain who the characters are, where they come from and how they know each other.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/5

To paraphrase Shakespeare, madness in gifted ones, or eccentricity at once errant and forthright, must not unwatched go.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5