Outside Satan

I find the movie mind-blowing, though it will likely alienate as many viewers as it impresses.

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

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

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

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.

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

But Dumont's film strips down its religious undertones and goes for something more interesting and ambiguous. Not that there is no beauty in showing religious faith, but it's helluva more interesting if the protagonist might as well be a devil!

The implications linger long after the film is over, and while it occasionally seems to be doing more meandering than exploring, Dumont provides us with much to contemplate, a hallmark of any great film.

Dumont's oblique style will frustrate many (which it certainly did when it premiered at Cannes), but if you embrace the mystery it makes for one of 2013's most fascinating films.

This leisurely piece of acutely philosophical, existential cinema is reminiscent of the works of Tarkovsky, Bergman and Bresson, with Dumont yet again proving himself to be one of the great contemporary auteurs.