The Soul Eater 4K 2024

Two police officers join forces to investigate two intricate cases: the brutal double murder of a married couple and the disappearance of children... At the scene of the crime, they find a figurine of a horned monster from local legends....

The genre of this movie I would define as 'somber French detective' - in the spirit of 'Crimson Rivers'. Here all the characters must necessarily have a mental trauma, the crimes must be prohibitively monstrous, under suspicion may be the whole city, and from the gray sky must be cold rain. Not a gram of humor, not a shred of blue sky, not a shred of hope. Beware - the movie activates depression!

It is nevertheless very interesting to watch. In some places the events and clues make your eyes ripple: there are two independent police teams, and a series of bloody murders (the victims died and... ended), and a plane that fell in the woods, and a suspicious motorcyclist, and a dead dog.... There is a sense of a chessboard where so many pieces have piled up that there is nowhere for them to go. The cooler the denouement that puts everything in its place. And although the clue of 'who' becomes obvious from about the middle of the movie, the question of 'why' remains open until the very end.

The duet of the main characters is also interesting to follow: two deeply traumatized cops (He and She), avoiding even a hint of romance, nevertheless find support in the person of each other: She has a terrible loss in her past, and he.... and almost nothing is known about him until the finale. It is interesting that with formal gender equality the male cop still gets the dirtiest job - to run through the woods under a hail of bullets, and to fight off the axe, and to jump around the sawmill....

I didn't give the maximum score to the movie, perhaps, because of the play of child actors (the dead families have children in the town, telling about the local legend about the 'Soul Eater'). Despite what their characters have been through, the young actors play as if they are in a heartwarming family movie. Maybe the director did not set them a task, sparing the children's psyche, but these key characters remained undiscovered.

Otherwise - I can only be glad to see such a twisted thriller on our screens, and also based on the book. And when the masks fall off - and in a good detective story they always fall off at the very end - it remains only to be horrified by the depth of human atrocities, compared to which any mystical 'soul eater' - just an innocent horned angel.