Outside Satan/ Hors Satan

Directed by Bruno Dumont. Starring David Dewaele, Alexandra Lemâtre, Juliette Brouton, Christophe Bon Club, IFI, Dublin, 110 min

A mysterious poacher (David Dewaele) and a young glum goth girl (Alexandra Lemâtre) set out across the scruffy, desolate marshlands of France’s Boulogne sur Mer. They’re a fantastically odd looking couple: her strange piglet eyes make it difficult to say if she’s sleepy or just unfocused. He holds his boot over an improvised campfire. Birdsong and wind provide the only sounds.

We later see the girl hand him sandwiches, though their relationship is ill defined at best. She repeatedly instigates playful physical contact, though he doesn’t respond in kind. Might that be on account of the bizarre, quasi-sexual sin-eating miracle we see him perform much later in the film? Might it be because of the strange silent worship they direct toward the nearby mountainside? Who can tell? This is a Bruno Dumont joint.

We can say for certain that there’s a bond between the pair. We know, for example, that when she says: “I can’t take anymore”, her displeasure is enough to provoke a shooting, albeit an unexplained one.

Repeated motifs and pillow shots – a strange, Soviet-style water tower, a wasteland of rusted corrugated iron structures and abandoned vehicles – seem to mask and frame even more pillow shots. The meandering narrative may or may not form a religious crusade.

Six features in to the fabulously intriguing career of writer-director Dumont and we’re none the wiser. For a self-professed atheist, there’s a whole lot of god in the French auteur’s details. With similar perversity, Dumont’s naturalistic house style – it’s diegetic or nothing – is undercut by avant-garde flair and miraculous occurrence.

Outside Satan is a case in point. Cinematographer Yves Cape’s stark landscapes – the most seductively austere tableaux this side of The Turin Horse – provide a counterpoint to the screenplay’s enigmatic movements. Like the divine forces that the director continually flirts with, Dumont moves in mysterious ways. And like his weird leads, we’re happy to kneel by the sacred wetlands, even if we can’t quite say why.

It’s not just a movie: it’s a cinematically motivated act of faith.