Achoura (Movie Review)

PLOT: A creature called Bougatate has been tormenting the children of Morocco for a long time, and a group of adults who encountered the child-eating demon twenty years ago are about to cross paths with it again.

REVIEW: Director Talal Selhami’s Achoura (watch it HERE) is not a film that’s interested in giving the viewer all the information they need right up front. Selhami and co-writers Jawad Lahlou and David Villemin chose to leave us in the dark for a long stretch of the movie, only giving sporadic bits and pieces of information while the story jumps back and forth in time and we’re shown strange, bewildering visuals. It isn’t until we’re about an hour into the film’s 92 minute running time that it finally becomes clear exactly what’s going on – and since Selhami holds off on allowing the audience to understand the full story for that long, some viewers might find this movie to be a very frustrating experience.

The film’s approach to doling out information also makes it quite difficult to write about Achoura, because Selhami apparently didn’t want the viewer to know much about it in advance. Once you’ve read any kind of plot synopsis, you’ve already gotten more of a head start on understanding the movie than you’re supposed to have… So I’m going to try to avoid giving away too much.

What I can say is that the film is set in Morocco and begins during the titular religious celebration (also known as Child’s Night), which involves children splashing water on each other and gathering around a bonfire. Two children leave the celebration, going off through a cornfield and soon arriving at a crumbling old mansion, which turns out to be home to a demonic, child-eating creature called Bougatate. Jump ahead some decades and we’re introduced to a bunch of adults – Younes Bouab as Ali, Sofiia Manousha as Nadia, Iván González as Stéphane, Omar Lotfi as Samir – who have obviously come in contact with Bougatate at some point in their past, but most of them have done their best to wipe that experience from their memories. That’s why the viewer has so little information for most of the movie, because the characters we’re following don’t have a firm grasp on what’s going on, either.

The actors do fine work in their roles and they’re given some intense material to work with, but I was left feeling that the story would have been more effective if it weren’t told in such a fragmented way. If we had gotten to know the characters better and really care about them before seeing them deal with difficult situations, we’d be more likely to get emotional with them. The Nadia character also occasionally felt underwritten, especially in moments where she just stands and stares even when people’s lives are in danger and she could be doing something to help out.

Achoura falls a bit short of potential it could have reached with some restructuring and some tweaks to the script, but it holds up as a solid creature feature overall. If Guillermo del Toro decided to produce an adaptation of Stephen King’s It that was set in Northern Africa, the result would probably be something like this.

Achoura has come along about a decade after Selhami made his feature directorial debut with a horror fantasy film called Mirages, and hopefully we won’t have to wait another decade to see his next feature film. I haven’t seen Mirages, but Achoura shows that he is a talented genre filmmaker.

Dark Star Pictures is giving Achoura a digital and DVD release on December 14.

Achoura

GOOD

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