Bruno Dumont's latest film Hors Satan is beautifully shot in a protected area on the coast of Northern France, where the director has been living most of his life. Hors Satan engages in a unique way with the landscape to emphasize the inner life of the film’s characters, a world of sand dunes, woods and marshes.
By the Channel, along the Côte d’Opale, near a hamlet with a river and a marshland, lives a unusual guy who struggles along, poaches, prays and builds fires. A girl from a local farm takes care of him and feeds him. They spend time together in the wide scenery of dunes and woods, mysteriously engaging in private prayer at the edge of the ponds, where the devil is prowling...
Cannes Flm Festival 2011, Official Selection, Un Certain Regard
★★★★
“It could be the anti-hero who is supposed to be ‘outside Satan’ in Bruno Dumont’s latest film or it could be the remote, islanded world he inhabits…It is perhaps safer to say that he is outside both God and Satan…As ever, the visionary, radioactive glow is compelling…It’s a world in which grim brutality and glorious beauty can co-exist.
Bruno Dumont’s film-making is just so fluent, unnerving, gripping; he is entirely unique”
“A lucid dream of violence and beauty.”
Peter Bradshaw THE GUARDIAN
★★★★★
“Bruno Dumont always makes original, intense, at the same time, provocative movies.
Beautifully shot, capturing the landscape magnificently, by Yves Cape, Dumont forces the viewer to watch a different reality, mixing the disturbing and the beatification - it is at once fascinating in its sincerity and disquieting in its frankness, and it's hard not to admire the film's poetic honesty.
Rita Di Santo, MORNING STAR
★★★★
"Mesmerising, beatific, disturbing, and leaves us pondering our own beliefs in a way few films do.”
Trevor Johnston, TIME OUT
★★★★
“Dumont – such a vital and necessary presence of the current cinematic landscape…Hors Satan is an investigation into the elastic nature of good and evil…If you’re interested in tackling questions pertaining to a higher power which are articulated in near-abstract terms, then you could do a lot worse than worship at the altar of Dumont.”
“With Hors Satan his most poetically and spiritually opaque film to date…“Bruno Dumont is nothing if not reliably contentious. And that’s why we love him.”We think it’s kinda brilliant.”
David Jenkins, LITTLE WHITE LIES
“His sixth, and perhaps most compelling…Dumont’s film appears to be dealing with a similar provocative theme, the notion of the closeness of the sacred and the demonic, the idea that good and evil, the Christ-like and satanic, are different sides of the same coin.”
Philip French THE OBSERVER
★★★★
"It’s not just a movie: it’s a cinematically motivated act of faith"
Tara Brady, IRISH TIMES
★★★★
"Dumont remains one of Europe's most divisive and challenging directors, with Hors Satan a prime example of his provocative, yet taxing minimal style."
Patrick Gamble, CINE-VUE
★★★★
“A typically stark provocation…perplexing and compelling.”
David Parkinson, EMPIRE
“Probably his greatest film, it’s a brilliant distillation of his customary themes and preoccupations. It shows Dumont is world-class right at the top of his game.”
Kieron Corless, SIGHT & SOUND
FILM OF THE WEEK: Hors Satan
“French provocateur Bruno Dumont’s latest Hors Satan…a disturbing enigma, it leaves us never quite sure of the nature of the bizarre phenomena we’re witnessing.”
Carmen Gray, DAZED DIGITAL
"This latter-day parable, about a drifter roaming the farmland of Northern France, sees Bruno Dumont taking over from the late Krzysztof Kieslowski as the high priest of European arthouse. It’s tough but rewarding viewing.”
Mike McCahill, MOVIEMAIL
★★★★
'An intoxicating experience'David Jenkins
Time Out'A must-see among artfilm aficionados.'
Rob Nelson,
Variety
‘Fantastic’Gérard Lefort,
Libération'Using both longueurs and repetitions, Dumont has a way of holding our attention by refusing us the expected answers.'Jonathan Romney,
Screen‘ Two non-actors with a matching absence of affect and complementary hairstyles—his slicked back, hers spiked up—tramp silently around the beautifully photographed dunes and marshes of northwest Normandy, engaging in strange rituals and precipitating peculiar outbreaks (including one of Dumont’s trademark sex acts). It’s a Stone Age tale, ascetic, enigmatic, and intermittently violent.’Jim Hoberman,
Village Voice'Hors Satan transcends its own realist aesthetic and Dumont’s love of physical environment by veering toward the sublime. This narrative shift comes in the form of spiritual transformations that carry distinct religious overtones. Dumont crafts a film in which logic, reason and the structures of society give way to other forces, moving us outside our comfort zone into a space that can be described as other-worldly and highly personal. Directing with his customary discipline and mastery, Dumont once again impresses and confounds, raising as many questions as he answers.'Toronto International Film Festival