This week I worked on a corporate in Derby and stayed with my friends Tom and Chrissa, owners of the production company, Light Films. They hadn’t seen Soul Searcher, despite hearing much about it, so I took a copy of it along and we watched it one evening. It’s been a few years since I’ve watched the film, so I was interested to see how I would feel about it after all this time.
The opening 15 minutes seemed slow and clunky (I was reminded of Jonny Lewis’s comment in Going to Hell: The Making of Soul Searcher that the first cafe scene should have been cut tighter), but after that the movie found its feet and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it stood up. Our script definitely needed about four more drafts doing before we shot it though; it’s very sloppy.
Whilst I feel I could get better performances out of some of the cast if I was doing it again today, I’m very proud of the way I told the story (such as it was) through camerawork and editing. The sound design, Neil Douek’s mix and Scott Benzie’s score are all first rate and raise the production values significantly, as do the many varied and interesting locations. Unfortunately some of the FX let the side down, particularly the barely-mobile banshee (if only I could have found a few more quid to allow a more articulate puppet to be built) and the charming but misjudged stop motion ascension of Ezekiel. On the other hand, David Markwick’s spectral umbilical cords, James Parkes’ Moat of Souls FX and many of the incidental things like the portals work really well. The miniature train is pretty effective too, though perhaps some of its earlier shots should have been trimmed down.
All in all, The Guardian summed it up very accurately when they said “it looks great and moves beautifully” but it suffers from “an implausible and, at times, confusing script, and some barely regulation acting.”