By Keri O’Shea
Editor’s note: this editorial discusses plot elements in detail and as such contains spoilers.
One of the last of the Brutal As Hell team to get to see Axelle Carolyn’s most recent film, the feature-length Soulmate (2013), it had been my intention to just write a straightforward review – side-stepping the censorship issues which first Nia and then Ben have already discussed, to concentrate on the film we have left in its legal-and-above-board state. I will still be doing that, but the more I try to review the cut film, the more difficult it feels. For starters, see that arresting image at the top of the screen, with lead character Audrey (Anna Walton) so desperate and alone in the wake of her bereavement that she’s attempting suicide? Well, that scene – which had been Soulmate’s opening scene – no longer appears in the film as I saw it at all. All two and a half minutes of it have been excised.
I knew about the decision to trim such a large amount from the film, although until sitting down to watch it, I didn’t realise that the attempted suicide scene was how the film should have started. The effect of this is oddly alienating; you know you are meant to have seen something more; you’re even aware of the still image and might guess at how it would look on-screen; slowly, though, you understand that the suicide attempt has already happened in this version of the story, albeit in a hush-hush way, now hidden from the audience eye. My first impressions of the film were twofold, then – on one hand, aware of the outrage over the cuts, and on the other, landed with an odd sort of absence.
I would estimate – as this is all I can do – that the complete removal of the attempted suicide scene impacts upon all of the subsequent plot developments, and it did feel that way to me: that supreme low point in Audrey’s life should have been shown, to enable the audience to appreciate her mental state, to show us why she feels so frail that even her own family are too much for her, and to justify her decision to flee everything, heading to rural Wales in the hopes that she can recuperate. In terms of the supernatural development in the plot, this, too, hinges on us understanding completely what this woman has gone through. We are meant to be shocked by suicide or attempted suicide. But by being confronted with it, this shock would have aligned us with the idea that something so extreme in Audrey’s ‘energy’ prompts Talbot’s appearance. As the film stands, this idea still comes across, but in some important respects it has had its teeth pulled – not least because in the censored Soulmate, we don’t get the same idea of the circularity of Audrey’s plight – first, she’s struggling to end her life by cutting her wrists, then she’s struggling to save it, as she bleeds from the same area and the same type of wounds. Not that we see much blood…
Mention of ‘strong violence and gore’ used in the BBFC write-up of Soulmate seems laughable, given many of the films which have sailed through the censors unharmed. Not least of which was Jörg Buttgereit’s 80s shocker Nekromantik, passed at last with flying colours in the same month a quiet supernatural thriller like Soulmate took the bullet. If the argument made is that the BBFC need to restrict access to scenes of ‘imitable behaviour’, then how does one define imitable? Isn’t corpse fucking imitable if someone really, really puts their mind to it? In fact, isn’t anything imitable within certain bounds; so long as it isn’t supernatural, or requiring means beyond most people such as an army of their very own, behaviour can be copied, can’t it? It is beyond ridiculous and wildly patronising to assume that suicide is nothing more than a sort of latent stupefied urge, one which would lie dormant unless activated by a scene in a film, or indeed that in the age of the Internet, anyone would rent a film to find out what they could Google in a moment.
In fact, in this age of the internet – when you can find out how to make a pipe bomb, or see a real person being hacked to pieces, or join a militant organisation, or bring down corporations with computer viruses – the BBFC seem even more determined to hang onto their old-school arbitrariness and protestations about the Greater Good, with their occasional ludicrous consumer surveys and politics-of-the-day-laden edicts. They come across like King Canute, but they’re not even facing the right way. The sum of this anachronistic, paternalistic nonsense is in bizarre decisions like the Soulmate cuts.
This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy Soulmate – that’s not my purpose in writing this – and I’ll review it shortly. But my heart goes out to Axelle, her cast and her crew that they have had their film offered up in this way, just so that someone, somewhere can feel they’ve kept us all safer. It’s very hard not to share that frustration, especially when you feel you have to preface a review of a good new horror film with a proviso.