Outside Satan

Outside Satan (Hors Satan, 2011) is a French arthouse drama by Bruno Dumont that you can watch online on iFILM. On the windswept Côte d'Opale coast — dunes, marshes, a hamlet that barely registers — a nameless drifter has settled in. He keeps fires going, poaches, prays. A young woman from a nearby farm brings him food and keeps returning. What binds them has no name.

Dumont strips every scene to its minimum: no backstory, almost no dialogue, no resolution. The drifter does things that read as violence and protection at once, as sin and something closer to holiness. It's the same ambiguous territory Dumont staked in Flandres, which claimed the Cannes Grand Prix in 2006 — but Outside Satan pushes further into unanswerable territory.

Slow and demanding and impossible to explain away. Stream Outside Satan (2011) online on iFILM.