Bruno Dumont’s sixth and latest film continues his exploration of the role of the sacred in the modern world, begun with its precursor, Hadewijch (2009), a cryptic fable of convents and terrorism whose overt religiosity Hors Satan deliberately avoids. From his stark tale of a mysterious loner who appears in the coastal dunes outside a rural town and seems to posses superhuman – or supernatural – powers, Dumont skillfully constructs an allegory that keep us speculating whether these powers are holy or satanic, and whether the two might amount to the same thing. The few extraordinary feats performed by the mysterious stranger recall the miracles enacted in Pasolini’s Gospel According to Matthew in that they are presented as simply and literally as possible, bearing the gravity and weight of the human and only subtly radiating the  glow of the divine. So too this drifter who lies somewhere hors, or beyond, Satan, his more destructive acts simultaneously legible as expressions of banal anger, the impulses of a sociopath or the judgment of a deity. — David Pendleton