Thunder Levin

(In French, On Cable TV, November 2022) The “star-crossed lovers beyond time” trope gets a limp execution in Soulmates, a surprisingly uninvolving low-budget horror film that can’t get any traction from its promising elements. Here we have a novelist who’s really a near-immortal warlock who uses his fame to lure women… but wait, there’s a twist: he kills them so that he can use their bodies to reincarnate his long-lost love across time. Okay, so not much of a twist. Now, things get more complicated when he slips up after a few hundred years and his newest would-be victim escapes his plans… but the problem here isn’t with the premise (which is workable) than with director Thunder Levin’s limp and fuzzy execution. Even at 80 minutes, Soulmates drags on and can’t quite extract what it needs from its starting ideas. There’s more nudity than expected and a few quirky cameos (such as Julie Strain and Paul Bartel) but none of it can quite manage to overcome the underwhelming execution of the material.   There’s a reason why Soulmates is nearly obscure by now.