Axelle Carolyn makes feature debut with ghost storySoulmate
Actress-turned-filmmaker Axelle Carolyn is
currently in production on her first feature film. Carolyn’s husband, director Neil Marshall (The Descent, Dog Soldiers), is serving as executive producer on Soulmate, which was announced a couple of years ago under the working title Ghosts of Slaughterford but after some false starts didn’t begin shooting until late 2012. “It’s been a long time coming,” says Carolyn,
who previously appeared in Marshall’s Centurion and Doomsday, during a break in filming. “The script has come on by leaps and bounds. It’s a different incarnation now: an evolution of the idea that I started writing over three years ago. It actually feels like a blessing that it crashed last year, although it didn’t quite feel that way at the time! It’s now much more contained, and I’ve had time to make some more short films in be- tween, so although I would have been fine be- fore, I’m feeling a lot more confident.” Soulmate has many of the trappings of a clas-
sic ghost story, including its setting: an atmos- pheric, 17th-century cottage in the Brecon Beacons national park in Wales. Thanks to a late- year shoot during an unusually severe British No- vember, which saw record rainfall and subzero temperatures, there was never a need for the dry-ice machine to leave its box. “The genesis of the story was realizing that England has a really rich history of ghost stories,
but that all the best recent films in that genre have been Spanish,” Carolyn explains. “I wanted to bring the ghost story back here, so it’s ironic that we’ve ended up in Wales rather than Eng- land. But Wales has houses like this one!” A rather more neutral holiday cottage by trade,
the house has been decked out with strange art- work and plenty of taxidermy for the duration of the shoot. “People keep saying the house is another
character in the film, and I’m not sure quite what that means,” Carolyn notes. “But it’s a huge part of the atmosphere, that’s for sure. The owner swears that it’s really haunted and that she hears stuff all the time... .” Story-wise, Soulmate involves concert musi-
cian Audrey (Anna Walton: Hellboy II: The Golden Army), who suffers a trauma and travels to the mountains both to heal and hide. Once there, she meets a previous resident of the house, Douglas (Tom Wisdom: 300) – deceased but somehow still around. “It’s almost irrelevant that he’s a ghost,” says
Walton, who found herself high on Carolyn’s casting wishlist after she acted in the director’s short The Halloween Kid. “The point is that Au- drey’s finding living in the real world very diffi- cult. When she’s here with the ghost, it’s like a safe little bubble. There’s a theme about finding comfort in the supernatural, and in things that
Soulmate: (from top) Audrey (Anna Walton) explores the film’s creepy cottage, and Axelle Carolyn directs.
aren’t necessarily considered normal. And I like that a ghost is supposed to be scary thing, but in this instance he’s actually a comforting pres- ence.” Carolyn agrees that, to her, ghosts are not so
much frightening as tragic. “It’s that idea that they’re kind of stuck here, in between worlds,” the filmmaker says. “I wanted to explore that in- herent melancholy. It starts off as a very classical The Others sort of thing, but then it goes much more into being a sort of psychological drama. I don’t think it quite earns the title of horror.” Then how does she explain the exploding head
being crafted in the makeup room? “Oh, it’s not exploding,” Carolyn offers. “It’s just torn apart.” OWEN WILLIAMS