Critic Reviews

• Kirk Honeycutt, Hollywood Reporter

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

• Rob Nelson, Variety

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

• A.O. Scott, New York Times

  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.

• Mark Jenkins, NPR

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

• Lisa Schwarzbaum, Entertainment Weekly

  Dumont's rigorous, serious attention to the mysteries of good, evil, and faith rewards those willing to be confounded.

• Jonathan Kiefer, Village Voice

  Ultimately less an arty provocation than a secular invocation, Outside Satan seems almost helplessly exploratory, an honest account of groping for grace.

• Peter Keough, Boston Phoenix

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

• Robin Clifford, Reeling Reviews

  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.

• Laura Clifford, Reeling Reviews

  "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.

• Mark Asch, Film Comment Magazine

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

• Eric Monder, Film Journal International

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

• Mike D'Angelo, AV Club

  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.

• Rich Cline, Contactmusic.com

  Provocative French filmmaker Dumont pushes boundaries even further with an astonishing approach to the Christian narrative (the title translates as Outside Satan), mixing the sacred and profane to shake up audiences and get us thinking.

• Eric Kohn, indieWIRE

  The problem with "Outside Satan" is that the filmmaker has remained faithful to expectations without enlivening them.

• John Semley, Slant Magazine

  Bruno Dumont's employment of his bucolic French backdrop here attends to Hors Satan's muddying spiritual ambiguity.

• Philip French, Observer [UK]

  [Dumont's] sixth film and perhaps his most compelling ...

• , This is London

  The film develops a powerful hold on the watcher as it progresses. But beware, it takes you on the weirdest of metaphysical journeys.

• Grant Rollings, Sun Online

  It is hard to be certain who the characters are, where they come from and how they know each other.

Read all 18 critic reviews