But Dumont's film strips down its religious undertones and goes for something more interesting and ambiguous. Not that there is no beauty in showing religious faith, but it's helluva more interesting if the protagonist might as well be a devil!

| Feb 24, 2021

The implications linger long after the film is over, and while it occasionally seems to be doing more meandering than exploring, Dumont provides us with much to contemplate, a hallmark of any great film.

| Original Score: 3.5/4 | Aug 6, 2019

Dumont's oblique style will frustrate many (which it certainly did when it premiered at Cannes), but if you embrace the mystery it makes for one of 2013's most fascinating films.

| Jun 21, 2019

This leisurely piece of acutely philosophical, existential cinema is reminiscent of the works of Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson, with Dumont yet again proving himself to be one of the great contemporary auteurs.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 7, 2019

A tour de force of concentric filmmaking that functions as a searing document on the dichotomy of beauty and savagery at the heart of a bleak French coastal community.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 3, 2018

A slow-moving yet compelling film.

| May 14, 2018

"Hors Satan" is a film about finding moral bearings in a world where the old rules have gone awry, but it's also an opportunity for some vicarious tourism in seductive scenery.

| Feb 21, 2018

A haunting meditation on a controversial way of dealing with religious matters by a healer posing as a holy man, who blurs the line between right and wrong.

| Original Score: B | Jul 26, 2015

Dumont's final feature with the late Dewaele is as hypnotic as their collaboration in "Hadewijch," another lucid hallucination splendid with sex, demons and landscapes that could have been painted centuries ago.

| Apr 8, 2014

I find the movie mind-blowing, though it will likely alienate as many viewers as it impresses.

| Aug 2, 2013

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

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 30, 2013

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.

| Original Score: B- | Jan 30, 2013

"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.

| Original Score: B+ | Jan 24, 2013

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

| Jan 18, 2013

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

| Jan 18, 2013

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

| Jan 18, 2013

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

| Jan 18, 2013

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 | Jan 17, 2013

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

| Jan 17, 2013

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.

| Original Score: C+ | Jan 17, 2013