A developer of an app that puts clients in touch with mystical healers
faces a violent backlash when a consultation goes wrong.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Saïd Belktibia
Starring: Golshifteh Farahani, Denis Lavant, Jérémy Ferrari, Ange Rot, Isma Kebe,
Mathieu Espagnet
Following Ladj Ly's
Les Misérables
and Romain Gavras's
Athena, Saïd Belktibia's Hood Witch is another French
thriller in which someone tries to survive a night in a Parisian banlieue.
This time the conceit is employed as a modern day allegory for witch
hunts, but the metaphor is so on the nose that you're left to wonder why
the movie doesn't just go all out and make the protagonist an actual
witch.
Far from being a sorceress, Nour (Golshifteh Farahani) is a
fraudster who makes a living exploiting those who believe in such things.
She makes frequent trips to Morocco, returning with various lizards and
reptiles concealed on her person, which she then sells to practitioners of
witchcraft in the immigrant communities of the Parisian suburbs. The movie
opens in striking fashion as Nour and her young son Amine (Amine Zariouhi) return from one such trip. Noticing something wriggling under Nour's
clothes, the customs officer orders her to remove her dress, revealing
dozens of baggies filled with reptiles attached to her body. Nour manages
to sneak a few infant toads through, pulling them from her mouth via
condoms attached to a piece of string like an Amsterdam sex show performer
pulling beads from their...well, you get the idea.
Unfortunately Hood Witch never lives up to this early
promise. It drops us into the fascinating underworld of modern day
witchcraft that persists on the periphery of Europe's urban centres but
can't find anything interesting to do with this backdrop. Nour develops an
app that puts people in touch with various witches and sorcerers, and it
proves a success, though its rapid rise is unconvincingly portrayed
through a Tik Tok montage.
The success of the app makes Nour something of a local celebrity, but she
makes some dangerous enemies including her aggressive ex-husband (Jérémy Ferrari) and some black magic practitioners she refused to allow on her app. The
meat of the plot kicks in when Nour is approached by a father (Denis Levant) who mistakes his son's autism for possession. Following an exorcism
held by a rogue Catholic priest, the boy commits suicide. This sees the
locals turn against Nour, blaming her "sorcery" for the boy's death.
What follows will be familiar to anyone who has seen the aforementioned
Ly and Gavras films, as Nour attempts to escape the banlieue in one piece.
With Les Misérables and Athena you could buy
into the motivations or their angry mobs, which in both cases were driven
by revenge against a police shooting. It's not so easy to swallow the mass
outrage against Nour however, which sees half of Paris turn into foaming
at the mouth maniacs as they seek her out. We can understand an angry mob
wanting to bring her to justice but the extremes taken here, including an
attempt to burn her alive in another blunt allusion to past treatment of
witches, are just too over the top to make sense in the film's real world
setting. For this idea to work, the reality of the setting would need to
be tweaked a notch ala District 13, the 2004 French action movie that likely inspired this current wave of
banlieue set thrillers.
While Hood Witch lacks substance, it's not short of
style. Belktibia fashions some undeniably arresting images. Along
with Nour's coat of many lizards we get an apartment decorated in a
bizarre manner by empty bottles glued to the wall, and there's a fantastic
CG-aided shot that zooms up several flights of stairs in seconds, the
invisible camera turning on each floor's lights as it
passes. Belktibia may have set out to make a statement about religion
and its treatment of women, but Hood Witch suggests his
strengths lie in more superficial storytelling.
Hood Witch plays at
The Overlook Film Festival
from April 4th and will be distributed by MPI Media Group / Dark Sky
Films.
