The Soul Eater (2024)
Directed by Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury
Screenplay by Annelyse Batrel & Ludovic Lefebvre
Starring Virginie Ledoyen, Paul Hamy, Sandrine Bonnaire, Francis Renaud, Malik Zidi, Cameron Bain, & Lya Oussadit-Lessert.

Crime / Horror / Thriller

★★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SIGNIFICANT SPOILERS!
Avert thine eyes,
or be corrupted forever & ever.

Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury’s latest film The Soul Eater begins with news of a married couple being brutally murdered and missing kids in the surrounding area of a tiny little French town called Roquenoir. This brings an investigator from the national police, Commander Elisabeth Guardiano (Virginie Ledoyen), and a man from France’s National Gendarmerie, Captain Franck de Rolan (Paul Hamy), together as they each work on the two cases that turn out to be part of one larger mystery. Their dual investigation leads to dark places that neither Elizabeth nor Franck expected. They begin to see what’s happening in that town is linked to a local folklore figure known as The Soul Eater, a monstrous legend that preys on people by taking on the face of those they love.

What Bustillo and Maury do so perfectly in The Soul Eater is combine crime-thriller elements with the horror genre and folklore in service of revealing how a little town has been corrupted and, in turn, corrupted the lives of so many children and their families. The film explores how folklore and legends can be methods of control over the lives of a culture, especially over the young, and how the stories we tell, to others or ourselves, can hold great, even terrible power beyond just words.
One of the first ways we see folklore explored disturbingly in the film is folklore as a method of dissociation from real-life horrors. During the investigation, it’s theorised that Evan, the child whose parents were discovered murdered brutally at the start of the film, has used the Soul Eater story to dissociate from what he experienced at his abusive parents’ hands: “His interpretation of the legend may allow him a shield from the violence of his parents.” In another way, The Soul Eater depicts how folklore can be used to control people, particularly children. We hear early on how the legend of The Soul Eater is “a story told from generation to generation.” Later, after the big reveal, we understand how the local folklore has been used to cover up actual contemporary horrors being committed against local children, and how The Soul Eater has been a scapegoat for very real, very ugly crimes. Like Elisabeth remarks: “We are not in a legend.”

A great, subtle line in the film speaks to larger issues that begin to become clear once all of the plot is revealed: “But each family has its own description. Not everyone sees the same things.” This line relates very well to the Anna Karenina principle: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” While the line is actually about The Soul Eater’s physical form and what people see when the entity appears, we can take it in a much larger sense as being about how family abuse is all the same but it takes on different, varied forms amongst different families. And, of course, this plays out more literally as the secrets in Bustillo & Maury’s film continue to unfold.
Family traumas are a centrepiece of The Soul Eater right down to the protagonists. Franck and Elisabeth are both driven by their own traumas related to their children. They sit in opposition to the stark evil of those who’ve used the Soul Eater legend to dark, devious ends by controlling and terrorising children, which is why it’s extra horrifying to watch them in that Gothic sanatorium hotel where they discover the horrible place where the missing kids were once held; each room is even marked with a name that’s perversely subverted from its intended meaning, from Little School and Smiling Room, to the Nursery. The dark, Gothic capitalism of The Soul Eater elevates this crime-horror by-way-of-folklore tale into something even more sinister through how the sanatorium hotel that made the little town of Roquenoir well-known and prosperous has been warped into a disgusting location used for dark web commerce. Franck and Elisabeth finally uncover everything when they go to the sanatorium’s ruins. As Franck watches a vide unseen to the audience featuring a child being tortured, the ringleader of the dark web site chillingly says without emotion: “People pay a lot of money to see that sort of thing.” Most upsetting is how the sanatorium hotel was once a place where people were helped, and healed, but now, it’s a barren, hideous place that produces nothing other than pain and trauma in the most vulnerable of people.

The Soul Eater is really about the stories we tell and for what purposes we tell them. Franck and Elisabeth each tell their own stories to themselves and others for different purposes. The people of Roquenoir tell themselves and their children stories for a number of reasons, too. In the end, Roquenoir’s stories are told to conceal brutal truths about the reality of human horror. Near the end, one character states: “For the monster to die, man must perish.” Bustillo and Maury’s The Soul Eater lays bare how human beings, not mythical creatures, are the true monsters of our darkest, most terrible stories.