The Soul Eater (Le mangeur d'âmes)

 Elizabeth (Virgine Ledoyen) is a mannered, gives-no-fucks police inspector investigating a bizarre double-homicide in the French province of Vosges; Franck (Paul Hamy) is an intense, driven young Captain who's on the trail of some missing children (he's introduced screaming while jogging himself ragged, which is blatant film language to let us know he's troubled.)

 Together, they fight crime. Kind of.

 The Soul Eater is a sort of collage of detective media from the last couple of decades, a film built almost entirely from common places, plot holes and contrivances tied together by a mystery that only gets shittier as the movie unspools its unlikely tangle of elements. It also throws in a possible supernatural threat and a few Nordic Noir-style disturbing plot elements to try and spice things up, which only makes its half-assed-ness feel tackier.

 It's never able to shake off the feeling that you've watched it before, but for a while it works; Both protagonists are fun to watch and their investigation at first seems interesting. Directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury know their way around a production of this sort and provide some good atmosphere.

 The two investigators' cases (the child abductions and the double murder) are linked, of course, and they soon learn of a local folkloric figure - the titular Soul Eater - who gets a shitty rhyme to say how he comes out of the woods to eat people and leave behind evil doppelgangers or something.
 There's also a mysterious motorcycle rider, a plane crash in the woods that keeps being brought up, and more police incompetence than you can shake one of those weird little wooden soul eater totems that keep appearing at all the crime scenes. And yes, more people soon start showing up dead all over the sleepy town.

 The French, of course, are adept at taking Hollywood crime movie conventions and making them their own - or at least making a banger out of them. The clearest influence here is 2000's The Purple Rivers (the directors have admitted as much). But there's not enough of anything here to sustain interest; the style is mostly subdued, there's very little action, and the police procedural/mystery elements hinge on people missing the obvious and other dumb conceits; The script, by Annelyse Batrel and Ludovic Lefebvre, adapting a novel by Alexis Laipsker, is a complete mess.

 Bustillo and Maury have ever been reliable providers of genre thrills, but while their gorehound sensibilities do give this one a welcome spike of nastiness (the only time the film comes alive is a cruel, bloody late-movie portrayal of the inciting crime), there's not much they can do here other than keeping things nice and atmospheric. There are a couple of perfunctory foot chases, a couple shootings and a pretty neat car/bike stunt; Aside from than that, everything relies on the mystery itself - and its resolution - to hold things together... a task at which it fails, miserably.

Inside (À l'intérieur)

 The first thing we see in Inside is a fetus floating snugly in its womb - then something happens and the baby hits the camera lens with its face, a cloud of blood invading the frame. Extremely unconvincing CGI aside, it's one hell of a way to kick off a movie.

 The cause for the baby's discomfort soon becomes apparent as we get our first glimpse of our pretty pregnant protagonist, Sarah (Alysson Paradis), in the aftermath of a horrific car crash. She's survived; Her partner, unfortunately, didn't.

 As it turns out, her baby survived the crash as well, something Sarah seems a little ambivalent about when we catch up with her a few months later. It's the day before Christmas, riots are rocking suburban Paris, and it's the day before she's due to go to the hospital to have her baby delivered. Sarah goes around in a haze of depression, still clearly struggling to come to terms with facing the rest of her life - and looming maternity - alone.

 That night, a mysterious woman (Beatrice Dalle) knocks at her door and asks to be let in - and later appears in her garden. Sarah is justifiably unnerved, enough to call the police, who promise to patrol the area and check in later. It's no good; As soon as she goes to sleep, the stranger breaks in and wanders her house, watches her sleep, brandishes a very nasty pair of scissors a little too close to her belly...

 After a brutal, wince-inducing attack at about the half-hour mark, Sarah ends up locked in the bathroom while the stranger paces outside, demanding Sarah gives herself up for butchery. The movie never lets up, going through a handful of established characters that meet various horrifying ends. It's a relentlessly brutal, extremely gory and harrowing home invasion that quickly leaves poor Sarah covered in blood from head to toe.

 Besides being one of the poster girls for the horror branch of the French New Extremity 'movement', Inside marked the debut of the writer/directing duo Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, who've since built up a pretty cool and varied body of work within the genre. This one remains their bloodiest and their best.

 It's very much of a piece with the other horror movies from the 00s, except much better than most. The CGI baby - who pops up multiple times to give the film an even more jagged edge - is a great bad-taste concept, but unfortunately the execution is so laughably bad that it counts against the movie even as it makes it more memorable. The same goes for other scenes where CGI is used, including a conceptually cool but visually botched face-torching moment.

 Elsewhere, though, the computer imagery is not that bad, mostly because the film wisely limits their time on screen to very quick flashes. The more prevalent practical gore effects are appropriately disgusting and over the top - expect blood to cascade down stairs and shoot out in almost comical high pressure from puncture wounds. There's face explosions, disembowelments, and more stabbings than you can shake a pair of oversized scissors at. The carnage is graphic, extremely well made and brutal enough to undercut a gorehound's glee. Almost.

 More than anything else, it's an excellent and particularly bloody single-location slasher. The script hits a couple of bum notes but mostly nails the give-and-take between suspense and mayhem all the way to a fucking excellent, bleak-as-all-hells finale.

 The two women at the center of the film are great characters - one melancholy and relatable in her orneriness, the other one inscrutable and batshit insane; There's more than a little Audition in this movie's DNA, including gearing up its psycho in a memorable getup that almost doubles as fetish gear. 

 Visually It avoids the boring, desaturated look that most American horror of the time was affecting by bathing everything in soft, mostly amber lights (cinematographer: Laurent Barés). Like most Bustillo/Maury joints, it's fairly stylish and very energetic.

 Highly recommended as long as you have a stomach for this sort of thing.

Kandisha

 Kandisha follows a group of friends over summer break in the French Baineaus - the sort of place that films like Bac Nord would consider enemy territory. Three teenaged friends in particular: Amélie (Mathilde Lamusse, white), Morjana (Samarcande Saadi, Arab) and Bintou (Suzy Bemba, black). If you're wondering why I'm listing their ethnicities... well, it's because the girls themselves bring it up every time they can, teasing each other good-naturedly; Whether it might be tied to what's coming once the plot kicks in... well.. yeah, it does factor in. Bintou also gets ribbed as belonging to the bourgeoisie because she moved out of the ghetto, which might be the Frenchest thing I've seen in a while.

 These young women and their extended social group are brash, dumb and a little obnoxious - which, yeah, it tracks: they're teenagers. But the girls in particular have a lot of chemistry and are pretty funny, and the script does a great job of establishing how much they care about each other and their families. Which kind of sucks because they all reside in a horror movie.

 After a night out Amélie is attacked by her ex-boyfriend - it's pretty horrific, but at least she manages to defend herself successfully. Still in shock, she remembers a Moroccan tale Morjana told her about an avenging demon that can be summoned to punish menfolk; all it takes is drawing a pentagram in blood and calling her name - Aisha Kandisha.

 Which she, of course, does. And it works! Kandisha appears as a beautiful woman almost completely covered by a burqa and chases the creep until he's squished by oncoming traffic.

 But what sort of horror movie would this be if the summoning didn't have terrible consequences? That'd be like... I don't know, remaking Candyman so that the titular demon ends up being a force of social justice. So Kandisha, once summoned, can't go back to hell or wherever she came from until she's killed six men. And - no cheating, no killing people who might deserve it; She immediately goes after people Amélie and her friends love.

 The meat of the movie consists of the girls trying to find a way to get rid of the summoned demon to protect the others... all while said demon goes around butchering said others. It's a pretty good monster! It really is based on an old bit of North-African folklore, and evolves throughout the movie from an almost human-seeming succubus, a giant demon thing, and something in between the two. The depictions I've seen of her all tend towards the normal-sized succubus, but I'm not going to complain about getting a cool creature too. All of her forms have hooves, which figure prominently in the film's most memorable death.

 Script-wise it's a mixed bag. The plot is derivative, extremely predictable, and unless my maths have failed me, it suffers from a pretty glaring plot hole... but some excellent character work (for a teen movie) gives it a kick most slashers lack; The movie builds up some good tension just by following around people on their day-to-day lives, making you wonder if they're going to get creatively brutalized by a goat woman (spoilers: they are). The acting is mostly good, with some rough patches, and everyone is pretty likeable. Except the ex-boyfriend, fuck that guy. (But even he gets a small scene showing he realized he screwed up before he gets flattened off-screen).

 There's no real message to the film, but it does play with France's colonialist past - Kandisha is said to be the ghost of a Moroccan woman killed by the Portuguese, and it's 'the white one' that summons her in the first place, wreaking havoc on all the other immigrant's lives. That 'the white one' did it out of victimhood just makes it more interesting.

 The cinematography (by Simon Roca), like the script, takes a few pointers from Bernard Rose's Candyman - which, let's be honest, can only be a good thing, at least when it's done well as it is here: Lots of long establishing shots, derelict environments, and a great atmosphere. Effects and gore, meanwhile, are a mixed bag: There's an extremely lousy death by CGI fire that made me laugh out loud (when will people learn?), but the rest of the kills are at the very least nasty fun, even when they lean silly. There's a couple of gruesome standouts - the movie was written and directed by Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury, after all, and they haven't lost any of their gorehound edge since Inside.

Seriously: When will people fucking learn?

 That gnarly gore aspect doesn't really prevent the movie from feeling like it's aimed at teens, and I suspect it might be pretty good in that respect: a short (eighty-five minutes) runtime, a cast of likeable, photogenic knuckleheads, a straightforward story with ample shock factor... hell, even the film's lack of originality. Yeah, it'd probably go down great at a slumber party.

The Deep House

 Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury enjoyed some infamy as part of the New French Extremity Horror wave of the late 00's with Inside, one of the better and most unsettling films of that short-lived movement. They've been plugging away since, with uneven results, and after some bad experiences working abroad they've elected to stay in France.

 In 2019 they released The Deep House, an excellent slow burn horror film that is low on explanation or common sense, but compensates by having a kick-ass premise, a bunch of great scares, great cinematography, and being creepy as all hell.

 Ben (James Jagger) and Tina (Camille Rowe) are a couple of twenty somethings trying to make a living by going into supposedly haunted buildings and filming their exploits. Ben is extremely British and very, very dickish, while his French fiancé is the more susceptible, easily scared one.

 Early on in the movie, they catch wind of a whole town that was submerged with the construction of a new dam, and decide that it would make a great webcast. So off they go to the south of France, equipped with SCUBA gear and an underwater drone.
 When they arrive, though, they find out that the lake is full of tourists, and that the town was demolished (as, sadly, they usually are in these cases; that's why there are so few subaquatic urban exploration pictures of this sort out there.)

 As (bad) luck would have it, though, a creepy local offers to take them to a branch of the lake that's off the beaten path, where he says they'll find a fully preserved manor house. Our intrepid youtubers take him on as a guide, and after a short dive find that he was telling the truth.

 The second and third acts are completely underwater, and the cinematography is astounding for a relatively low-budget euro-horror movie like this. The film plays very similarly to the same directors' earlier Livide (still their best, by my reckoning), with the young couple exploring the house room by room and finding evidence that things are very fucked up indeed in the house, with an expert buildup of creepiness that's not helped at all by their diminishing oxygen reserves.

 Things don't make an awful lot of sense, some of it by design (the movie subscribes to the idea that horror works best when it's unexplainable) and some of it due to weird decisions like recurring references to Tina's ophidiophobia. But it's an excellent update to the haunted house genre, with the killer twist that its victims are all divers.