Axelle Carolyn’s romantic ghost story debut Soulmate, which played at last year’s FrightFest all-nighter, is facing BBFC cuts.
Brutal As Hell reports that the BBFC have an issue with one scene in particular, and they’ll only pass the film with an 18 certificate once that sequence is trimmed. It’s currently set for a DVD release in August, but this is clearly an issue.
They posted a description of the scene, which contains SPOILERS, so if you want to know anything about the film’s plot, look away now.
SPOILERS BEGIN
“The decision relates to one particular scene. It’s not much of a spoiler to say which scene, but stop reading now if you want to avoid knowing any more. The film contains a scene of attempted suicide. The scene is certainly graphic, and certainly upsetting (as it damn well should be) – but is it really 18-certificate-subject-to-cuts levels of graphic and upsetting? No, not really, and there is literally nothing else in the film to merit anything close to an 18 certificate. Perhaps, though, technically the scene is 18 certificate-worthy. ‘Imitable behaviour’ is one of those particularly tricky aspects of the BBFC guidelines and it’s precisely under that banner that the cuts are being demanded. The film neither glamourizes nor condemns the suicide attempt shown. The character has suffered a personal trauma she is struggling to over-come, and the scene itself shows nothing more instructional than a hundred similar scenes in a hundred different films.”
SPOLERS END
Since the film has started playing at film festivals there’s been no mention of it containing the kind of material that raises red flags when it comes to mandatory trims. Brutal As Hell notes that they’d have guessed that the film would receive “a 12A, or at very most a 15.” They guess that it falls under the “imitable behaviour” category, which noisily hobbled The Human Centipede Part II under very different circumstances, and led to a scene in the first season of American Horror Story being trimmed.
Fingers crossed that this issue gets resolved and that we get to see Soulmate as its director intended.
