Soulmate and Shadowlocked

Over recent months I’ve tended to recommend new releases on my site, but my original intention was to focus on lesser-known films. Today, I want to recommend a film that slipped under the radar on release, but that I think deserves a bigger audience. It had quite an impact on me as I’ll explain.

SOULMATE was the 2013 feature debut of director AXELLE CAROLYN. You may have heard Axelle’s name recently, as she went on to direct episodes of several really well received genre shows, including THE HAUNTING OF BLY MANOR, CREEPSHOW, and THE MIDNIGHT CLUB. She was kind enough to send me a copy of SOULMATE when it was first released, and I’ve gone back to it numerous times since. I’ve mentioned previously that I’d been working on my latest novel, SHADOWLOCKED, for a number of years before it hit the shelves in May. For the longest time it felt like there was a connection missing in the story, and SOULMATE helped me find the key.

Widowed Audrey retreats to an isolated Welsh cabin after a failed suicide attempt, to recuperate. Still haunted by the tragic death of her husband and struggling with her psychosis, she begins to hear strange noises.

I have to admit, I’m a sucker for films set in the misty, autumnal Welsh countryside. Parts of North Wales in particular have a uniquely evocative atmosphere. There’s a melancholy about the less populated parts of the place. Give me damp, fog, and an old remote cottage anytime – the perfect setting for a horror story (I came up for the initial idea for AUTUMN while I was staying in the area around Dolgellau many years ago).

Just by virtue of its pace and location, SOULMATE exudes creepiness. There’s a sense of foreboding throughout the opening of the film as Audrey (played by the excellent ANNA WALTON) shuts herself away from the rest of the world to try and make sense of the wreck her life has become. She’s vulnerable – both mentally and physically scarred – and you get the sense that being here like this is make or break for her. Most likely break. She’s been through a lot, and has a lot more to go through yet.

Alone in the cottage, she begins to hear noises. There’s a mysterious locked room. Later, she thinks she sees someone inside the building when she looks back from outside. The villagers she encounters are by turn hostile or overly accommodating, and it’s no great surprise when we learn that the house is in fact haunted by the ghost of Douglas (TOM WISDOM) the previous occupant who killed himself.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this is a by-the-numbers horror movie, and though it hits a lot of familiar beats, I think it has a different focus to other similar films. It looks at Audrey’s impossible situation from a perspective that you might not be expecting, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. SOULMATE is extraordinarily atmospheric, and unfairly overlooked.

The relationship between Audrey and the ghost was in my mind a lot when I was writing SHADOWLOCKED. All too often there’s an assumption in horror that ghosts are the villains of the piece, but why should that be the case? I’m a sucker for sympathetic spirits – dead folks who’ve been wronged but who don’t necessarily want to take it out on the living. The view that the living=good and ghosts=bad is tiresome and cliched. Similarly, I think ghosts shouldn’t just be there to provide jump scares and cheap shocks. Stories are always much more powerful when all their characters have depth, and there’s no reason why that shouldn’t include the dead ones too. The evolving relationship between Audrey and Douglas in SOULMATE goes beyond the transactional and takes the story to a different place that I wasn’t expecting. It was an approach that helped me untangle SHADOWLOCKED and get it to the point where, despite her dying in the moments before the book begins, I was able to give Lucy Logan as complete a story as her surviving husband Adam.

As I always say, I don’t tend to review films on this site, just recommend them (or not). I’d definitely track down a copy of SOULMATE if you can (it’s available on DVD), and I’d be really interested to hear what you think.