Soulmate (2013)

 

Director: Axelle Carolyn

Screenplay: Axelle Carolyn

Cast: Anna Walton as Audrey; Tom Wisdom as Douglas; Tanya Myers as Theresa; Nick Brimble as Dr Zellaby; Emma Cleasby as Alex; Guy Armitage as Tristan

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies) #185-7

[Include bonus reviews of The Last Post (2011) and The Halloween Kid (2011) by Axelle Carolyn]

 

[Trigger Warning for Subject Matter Discussed about Suicide Themes]

It is best to look at Soulmate in comparison to two short films also by director and former actress Axelle Carolyn, making these effectively three reviews for the price of one. The Last Post (2011) is closer to a supernatural drama and is quite an effecting piece emotionally. An elderly woman (Jean Marsh) in her room in a care home has visions of a uniformed figure that no one can see, her female nurse presuming as anyone that this is the onset to dementia or another psychological issue. Far from this, this is connected to how she took part during one of the World War in writing to random male soldiers on the front as someone to help them through the scenario, falling in love with a figure she was never able to meet. It is a beautiful little short, a supernatural romantic drama rather than horror as death approaches but she has no fear of it.  This, as a set up for Soulmate, suggests a director-writer in Carolyn who is much more interesting the emotional drama of a scenario.

Also showing, however, her love for the genre, The Halloween Kid (2011) is a short for all the family as charmingly put together. It is a whimsical tale, narrative by Derek Jacobi of all people, it follows a young boy who can see monsters and ghosts but is not benefitted by it most of the year, as he gets into trouble at school for listening to the biology room skeleton tell jokes to him, and gets into trouble with his mother, played by the lead of Soulmate Anna Walton. Thankfully, in contrast to The Last Post's stark look with its colourful seasonal aesthetic, Halloween is the boy's favourite time of the year where he can escape from all this.

These shorts really give an idea that Carolyn was going to horror as a female director with a different tone to her style. Soulmate was the same, though sadly we cannot go further without the fact, realising this, that the film had an unfortunate run in with the British Board of Film Classification. It should not shadow the film's existence or its virtues, but as this is recounted for the review, the version covered for this review is the British release version which was affected by this. Soulmate's lead character Audrey (Anna Walton) is a traumatised musician who lost her boyfriend in a car crash, having had an attempt at committing suicide and afterwards leaving care without her family knowing to travel to Wales, renting a cottage in the countryside to exorcise her trauma. Tonally Soulmate tackles the subject very seriously, but it also involved a scene involving a very realistic suicide attempt by the slashing of the wrists that the BBFC felt even had to be censored, not just getting an 18 certificate, meaning only eighteen year olds could access the film for themselves, but 16 seconds of the images being censored entirely. The director-writer, feeling that the film would negate the importance of that sequence if censored, a two minute opening sequence of the suicide attempt, decided to remove the two minute or so scene entirely for the British release¹.

As a result this review of Soulmate has to begin with a literal phantom, as the version I saw unlike the International version, which is uncut, is left with the speculation on whether that sequence adds or detracts from the final result. Soulmate itself, regardless, is admirable as horror in terms of slow burn character drama. Baring some jolts, mostly from the use of the score once or twice, Soulmate never delves into anything in that direction. Instead the film progresses when, very early in, she encounters the ghost of the cottage's former owner Douglas (Tom Wisdom), who develop an attachment to each other because, having lost his former fiancée in a car crash and having killed himself with a pistol thirty years previous, they come together with an emotional bond of traumatised figures. Audrey however is a living person who is helped by this counsellor in her temporary home, whilst Douglas is a ghost stuck in the house unable to leave, whose inability to move on and having died with violent emotion will mean he is becoming obsessed with her.

The best way to describe Soulmate, which is also its best virtue, is that if the two short films by Axelle Carolyn are tiny little short pieces, like two or so page pieces if they were fiction, this is a short story adaptive into a feature length film. No fat and entirely focused with an intimate nature to the film, helped considerably by the location shooting in Wales; the rural countryside in British storytelling, especially horror and supernatural tales, has always been evocative and this is the same. Notably this is not the countryside as an ominous place however, but an isolated one with an isolated small town community where the drama comes from the ghosts of the past and emotions of the living. That most of the exterior shots are filmed in the day, and there are only a few locations used, the horror is less the wilderness but, as the plot begins, the locations adding atmosphere of a world completely cut off from the urban landscape and forcing contemplation from the characters.

Soulmate focuses entirely on its narrative, not a film which deviates in tangents. What cannot be denied is that Carolyn tackles the subject matter of grief and mental illness with nuisance, which makes the entire ghost of the BBFC controversy throw shade on the film classificatory being over cautious, a reminder that whilst they have become a beacon of free speech into the 2000s and 2010s, they still exhibit moments of deeply ill-advised choices, more nowadays a sense of an over-protectiveness that does not realise how a viewer for these type of controversial films are more self aware and  introspective about what they are watching than they presumed. There is a right mindedness to tackling depression and suicide to be found here. There is a lot more to this drama too which shows this. Early on, unlike some protagonists, Audrey actually goes to Dr Zellaby (Nick Brimble), one of the people who lets out the cottage alongside his wife, wondering if her anti-depressant medication causes hallucinations or not when she keeps seeing Douglas. When she accepts Douglas is real, bond and even learn that the longer they are together he can slowly start to be able to touch and move objects, the film even gets into the gendered biases of hysteria and how Zellaby plays the sceptical man who finds the female protagonist's beliefs in the supernatural absurd. This is furthered as the only other character who is his wife Theresa (Tanya Myers), who is aware of Douglas, knowledgeable on ghosts, but having a complicated past to Douglas romantically, meaning she has a bias in play too in her warnings to Audrey.

In fact the film can be argued to have a sad ending, with greater weight, that even if Audrey ends the story safe in a hospital with her family, said family still are going to patronise her and that, due to factors which break logic, she has only managed to escape a mental health clinic or prison due to them in the nasty aftermath. It is as much a tale of a woman being unable to be understood in her own life, trying to recover on her own two feet, through her music rather than pills. If the person who was helping her had not crossed the line into possessiveness and his own biases, even as a ghost, this could have easily been a drama with a happy conclusion. The irony that the BBFC felt one realistic scene of a wrist slashing was still inappropriate for a British audience in the early 2010s, not the old problematic era of censorship in the eighties and nineties, adds a perverse irony as they come off like anyone who do not understand Audrey's attempt to overcome her depression at all and are patronising.

It is, as a result, a very simple tale but provided with layers. Like those two short films, Soulmate can be appreciated for its leanings into more intimate drama. It is, with a shame, Axelle Carolyn has not really worked as much afterwards into the rest of the 2010s. It is inexplicable, be it an actual bias against female directors or not, that the only other project throughout the 2010s from Carolyn was a segment in the anthology film Tales of Halloween (2015). Hopefully this will change into the 2020s.

 

=========

1) HERE