Hors Satan Reviews
Film Comment Magazine
It's difficult to feel transported by the impossible when the film's world is already so clearly governed by the arbitrary.
Sun Online
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
Top CriticInarticulate characters, long blank stares, forced camera angles and allegorical nonsense make up this pretentious study in quasi-religious ennui.
Daily Express
The films of Bruno Dumont are an acquired taste that many of us have yet to acquire.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
indieWIRE
The problem with "Outside Satan" is that the filmmaker has remained faithful to expectations without enlivening them.
Full Review
| Original Score: C+
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
The promise Dumont once showed has ossified into unholy shtick.
Full Review
| Original Score: 2/5
AV Club
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+
Slant Magazine
Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/4
Quickflix
The question raised by Dumont in Outside Satan isn't, 'Would we recognise our saviour if he came back to Earth?', but rather, 'How would we tell him apart from the devil?" Are these thoughtful digressions worth the film's general unpleasantness? Just.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Cinema Autopsy
It is a difficult yet intriguing film with deliberately strange and ambiguous characters who challenge notions of good and evil, and how we perceive spirituality and madness.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Total Film
The vagueness won't win Dumont new fans, but his enigmatic allegory of intertwined good and evil does linger in the mind.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Daily Telegraph
Dumont's picture, as frustrating as it is profound, elicits the unease which passeth all understanding.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Eye for Film
in the mismatch of its blankly naturalistic style and its unquestionably supernatural events, the film confronts us with the moral openness of our own secularism.
Financial Times
To paraphrase Shakespeare, madness in gifted ones, or eccentricity at once errant and forthright, must not unwatched go.
Full Review
| Original Score: 3/5
Little White Lies
Not everyone will want to go back for more, but those who do will find rich rewards.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
The result is mesmerising, beatific, disturbing, and leaves us pondering our own beliefs in a way few films do.
Full Review
| Original Score: 4/5
Contactmusic.com
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
Reeling Reviews
"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+
Reeling Reviews
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-
