Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Starring: Mathilde Lamusse, Samarcande Saadi, Suzy Bemba
North African folklore meets North American grindhouse influences in
Kandisha, the latest offering from Gallic gorehounds Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury.
Kandisha takes a malevolent spirit from Moroccan mythology
and repurposes her as the sort of villain you might have found in a 1980s
Hollywood horror movie.
According to Moroccan lore, Aicha Kandicha is something of a cousin of
Ireland's Banshee or Latin America's La Llorona. Like the latter she is
said to lurk around bodies of water, though that aspect is ignored by
Bustillo and Maury. In their version she's a feminist avenging angel who
can be summoned by a woman to enact vengeance upon any male who does them
wrong.
Having learned of Kandisha from her Moroccan friend Morjana (Samarcande Saadi), Amelie (Mathilde Lamusse) calls forth the spirit when she survives an
attempted rape by her ex-boyfriend. The young man in question is killed
when he seemingly runs right into an oncoming car.
Amelie, Morjana and their friend Bintou (Suzy Bemba) dismiss it as
coincidence at first, but when their male friends start dying in bizarre
ways, they realise that Kandisha has indeed crossed the portal into our
own world. Before you can say "not all men," the Moroccan meanie is offing
everything with a penis in the bloodiest of manners. Can the girls find a
way to send her back?
Bustillo and Maury are biting off quite a lot here. Along with its
quasi-feminist allegory, there's a subplot about gentrification and
France's current quest to demolish the notorious banlieue tower blocks of
its multi-cultural suburbs (see also the recent
Gagarine). But the main subtext here seems to concern cultural appropriation.
It's no coincidence that of the racially diverse lead trio (a gender
reversal of the leads of banlieue classic La Haine), it's the caucasian Amelie who summons a spirit whose powers she's
completely ignorant of. Critics of cultural appropriation argue that you
should be prepared to take the bad with the good rather than cherry
picking the pleasantries of an alien culture. Amelie sure gets the bad
here, as her male mates are (literally) ripped asunder by the titular
terror.
Pardon me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe either Bustillo or Maury have
any North African roots, which would make them guilty of the very thing
they're critiquing. In their hands, Aicha Kandicha becomes a sort of
Freddy Kreuger knockoff, even growing to giant like status when she needs
to physically overpower her male victims. With her hoofed feet, she often
comes off as a particularly angry Miss Piggy, but she's certainly one of
the more memorable horror antagonists of recent times. Bustillo and Maury
may be treading on dodgy ground here, but that's for Arab critics to
decide. I'm just glad they managed to pull off a pacy, commendably
schlocky horror movie that hints at societal and cultural issues without
ever getting bogged down in them in the manner of many recent American
genre efforts.
Kandisha is on Shudder from July
22nd.
