- Directed by Alexandre Bustillo, Julien Maury
- Written by Annelyse Batrel, Ludovic Lefebvre, Alexis Laipsket
- Stars Virginie Ledoyan, Paul Hamy, Sandrine Bonnair
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 48 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=95hcFVjtNtg
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was very much a police procedural, with a pair of officers looking into the disappearance of children in a small area. There seems to be a supernatural slant to things, and the case gets weirder and darker the further they go along. It’s slow moving, but very entertaining. We both liked it a lot.
Spoilery Synopsis
A policeman interrupts Franck’s run with news. Later, he takes a bus out to the country. At a roadblock, he catches a ride with a woman he doesn’t know. He’s here to investigate alarming disappearances. Credits roll.
When the pair arrives at his destination, there are already flashing police cars there. It turns out, the woman in the car is Elizabeth Guardiano, the police commander in charge of the scene. Inside the house, there are two dead people, and it’s not pretty. The cop there thinks the couple got into a fight and killed each other very violently. They have a 12-year-old, but no one can find him. We cut back and forth between Franck and Elizabeth as they search different parts of the house.
Elizabeth finds Evan, the son, hiding in the basement. He says “The Soul Eater” came for them. Franck finds a weird little statuette outside in a van, and he pockets it. We see a shadowy figure on a motorcycle watching all of this.
Later, Franck shows Elizabeth photos of all the missing kids he’s looking for. The white van at the murder scene was involved in some of the disappearances. She’s only interested in the murders, but agrees to work together.
Franck takes a shower, but then sees someone in his room. Elizabeth goes to talk to the mayor of the little town. She chews out the local cops for not finding the hiding boy earlier. She’s arrogant, and the locals don’t like it; their town has had some hard times in recent years. The mayor wants to say the couple killed each other and there’s no murderer in their small town, but Elizabeth disagrees.
The doctor won’t let Franck talk to Evan, the boy, so he sneaks in on his own. He shows Evan the children’s photos, and he recognizes them. Evan says they’re all dead; the Soul Eater killed them. Evan sees the monster standing behind Franck, but Franck looks and there’s nothing there.
Elizabeth talks to the coroner, and the bodies are excessively damaged, but they did this to each other. It makes no sense. Also, they had orgasms as they killed each other.
Franck and Elizabeth talk about each other’s obsession over the case. They go back to the Vasseur house and search some more. They find that Evan has been sleeping in a dirty corner of the basement, not in the nice bedroom upstairs. They find the neighbor’s missing dog wrapped in plastic and poorly covered up in the backyard.
The pair gets a call. The man who runs the local lumber mill has been killed, with his head well sliced by a saw. The question of accident, suicide, or murder seems to be answered when Elizabeth finds another of those little carved statues right next to him. They ask Marcelin, the police chief, about the Soul Eater. He’s a sort of local legend, a boogeyman. Marcelin warns Franck that Elizabeth is just out of the hospital after a suicide attempt. Franck notices that both the lumber mill and the murder house had computers that have gone missing.
A man runs out of the building, and Franck chases him across the lumberyard. The man gets away, but he drops his backpack. The computer was inside, but the thing fell in the river and got soaked. Franck does get the hard drive out. Elizabeth goes to the church to read up on the Soul Eater. We hear various reports of a pilot who crashed a plane nearby two weeks ago; we’ve heard about this event several times already.
Elizabeth and Franck talk about their lives. Her daughter had been bullied at school and then killed herself.
Henri Maublanc, the man who found the body at the lumber mill, lied to the police about his story. We cut to him hanging out at home. When Elizabeth and Franck arrive outside, they hear screaming coming from inside. Maublanc has killed his wife and tries to kill Franck with an ax before Elizabeth shoots him. We see the mysterious motorcycle man outside again. Afterward, Elizabeth looks for Maublanc’s daughter, but we see that she’s hiding outside. In the girl’s closet, they find more stuff about the Soul Eater.
At the hospital, the Soul Eater comes for Evan, and they walk out, hand in hand.
Elizabeth tells Franck that Jeanne Maublanc, the daughter, probably knows the perpetrator, as she’s obsessed with the Soul Eater. Evan’s doctor comes in and explains his history of abuse. She wanted Evan institutionalized, but his parents wouldn’t hear of it. Evan and Jeanne went to school together.
On the road, Elizabeth and Franck get shot at by the motorcyclist and wreck her car when she stops and backs into him. The shooter is injured but tries running for it, and Franck follows him through the woods. Franck catches the guy, who says he has nothing to do with the children. He says the plane that crashed was special, full of drugs, and he’s here to collect it. He says if you take a little, you get nice and high, but if you take too much, well, “You saw the results.” Where did the drugs end up?
The hard drive Franck found shows that the adult victims all knew each other from a chatroom on the dark web. There’s also a location that Franck and Elizabeth need to check out. It’s the location of the old sanitarium.
Splitting up to search the sanitarium, Elizabeth comes across one of the local cops, Gonnet, who claims to be looking for the missing children. She’s soon attacked by him wearing a mask. She shoots him repeatedly. Gonnet has a key that opens a door that Franck found. There’s all kinds of weird costumes in the room along with the missing computers. Then they find other rooms, themed and decorated, where child porn and torture has been filmed. They find Evan and Jeanne locked in a room.
Jeanne explains that they knew their parents were bad people – clearly alluding to them using Jeanne and Evan in kiddie porn, but then the Soul Eater came and possessed them. They weren’t satisfied and needed more children, so they abducted other kids. She tells the story of finding a package of the missing drugs in the forest. She thought it was magic salt, part of the Soul Eater lore, and then she and Evan tried it on the neighbor’s dog, who went crazy and died. Both kids then fed the drug to Evan’s parents, who promptly went crazy, killed each other excessively, and had a great time doing it. The sawmill guy was next. Then her dad who killed her mom, who wasn’t an active participant but knew what the others were doing.
Suddenly, the lights go out. “He comes for you,” says Evan. We see someone outside putting on the Soul Eater’s mask. Mercelin calls Elizabeth and alerts her that Franck isn’t a detective or even who he claims to be. Franck locks them all in the room and goes out looking for the kidnapper. They soon get out, and everyone convenes in the room with the Soul Eater.
Franck admits that he’s the father of one of the missing kids. Franck attacks the masked criminal, pulls the mask off, and we see that it’s the mayor who has been behind all this. She even shows him footage of his son’s death, smirking that he didn’t last a week. “People pay a lot of money for that sort of thing.” Franck puts down his gun, but the two children attack her and make her eat the drug. Franck sees this and leaves his knife within easy reach of her. He leaves her locked alone in the room as the drug takes effect…
Franck stands outside, pours alcohol all over one of the rooms used for filming and smokes as the screaming starts from the mayor. He then burns everything. Franck passes Elizabeth and the kids outside and hands her his gun and fake id before walking off into the darkness. “Who are you, Franck?” she asks. He replies, “A ghost.”
Brian’s Commentary
It’s long and slow-moving, but we never got bored with it. It’s mostly a mystery/police procedural, but there’s something supernatural going on all throughout. Actually, it turns out to be even darker than that. In the end, everything is explained and makes perfect sense, but it’s all a very nasty explanation and no one leaves happy.
It’s good!
Kevin’s Commentary
I thought this was pretty great. It is on the long side, but it keeps pulling us along as they find more clues and more details of what’s going on. The mystery is well written, making it seem like there’s supernatural forces that may be at work, and hiding things well. The truth is even more awful when we find out what some of the ordinary people, not literal monsters, have been up to. I’d recommend it.
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