Hors Satan (2011)

Directed by: Bruno Dumont | 110 minutes | drama | Actors: David Dewaele, Alexandra Lematre, Aurore Broutin

Even more than in previous Dumonts, his nameless protagonist – called Le gars (‘the boy’) in the credits – is a creature from another world. It’s a wanderer from the Middle Ages, that era as cruel as faith-driven. Once again, such a character is allowed to function in a backward rural environment today. Dumont again does a good job with the casting, with David Dewaele’s mysterious, gypsy-like Janus head – a habitué. The quiet acting of Alexandra Lematre, who Dumont showed up in a cafe (‘Elle’ in the title role), is a discovery.

‘Hors Satan’ seems to build on the cautious spirituality of ‘Flandres’ and ‘Hadewych’; yet the film is not progress – rather a step backwards – in Dumont’s work. ‘Hors Satan’ could also have been Dumont’s debut film, if we ignore the budgetary steps. A film that you sit through out of interest, because something happens in almost all, mostly wordless, naturalistic scenes and because you know that Dumont always comes up with a bouncer.

Random violence: we know it from all his movies. A Glimpse of Love: Dumont showed it to us in the aforementioned projects – more ambitious than ‘Hors Satan’. Because of this predictability, the duel between violence and love is less effective this time. ‘Hors Satan’ seems like a Dumont in regression, with the director initially cynically taking pleasure in crushing the fledgling hopes with gratuitous violence from Le gars, who as the film progresses seems more and more like an ‘ordinary’ psychopath – a qualification that the careless viewer would ascribe to this young man in any case.

Dumont watchers know that this director works with special allegories. Is he wrong when his deterministic view of man starts to show religious traits? No, we say in advance, for the human species has been moving between animal and god since its origin, the former always showing itself and the latter sometimes showing itself. What Dumont shows us at the end is a miracle. However, the divine splendor of nature, filmed on location in the dunes near Boulogne-sur-Mer, and the violence of man, cannot lead to anything good – however much Bruno Dumont tries in ‘Hors Satan’.