Ritos diabólicos

Dachra is unique in that it is the first Tunisian horror movie I've seen and particularly in the first couple of acts, that in itself is almost enough recommendation to see the film. It is rather intriguing watching this slow-building, creepy piece, whilst at the same time hearing lines of idiosyncratic dialogue such as "May the blessings of Allah be upon you." Director/writer/and just about everything else except popcorn vendor Abdelhamid Bouchnak, should be congratulated over this, his debut feature. The next best thing I can say about Dachra is that Bouchnak excels at building an atmosphere of eeriness concerning the story of a trio of journalism students, attempting to build a video news story assignment around a gruesome criminal case over 20 years old. Unfortunately in presenting his finished product, one finds that he hasn't been able to restrain himself from overindulging his borrowing of too many tried and tested horror tropes.

Visually, the film initially proves interesting, with Director of Photography: Hatem Nechi demonstrating he is more than prepared to adopt a variety of unusual angles to lens proceedings, using a very much desaturated black-and-white look to underline the stark, bleak nature of the story. But one does eventually tire of massive numbers of shots approached with Dutch angles, with quite a few seemingly deliberately out of focus. Towards the end of the film we even get the good old, nausea-inducing, spinning head in the kaleidoscopic panel, just for good measure. It's almost as if director Bouchnak was apologetic over not presenting a found-footage film and decided to dazzle us with visual tricks as the next best thing.

Character wise it's very much run of the mill. A trio of loud, almost obnoxious and therefore largely unsympathetic personalities who consistently make (really) dumb decisions and thus, unsurprisingly end up in a life and death situation in a rural village with the title name. I should add there is a very late, very contrived twist to somewhat explain their constantly, chaotic, unrealistic behaviour, but I just didn't buy it and it really didn't make a lot of sense. The central protagonist Yasmine transitions from attempting to be portrayed as a plucky, feisty heroine, to an annoyingly, blubbering, screeching damsel in distress, all in the space of a few seconds. And I still haven't worked out how her grandad, who has a tenuous connection to the main thread, knew she was in Dachra. I don't recall her, or anyone telling him.

Narratively, Dachra feels about 15 minutes too long. Stuff occurring in the village just seems to be repeated (literally) ad nauseam. One feels the conclusion is just dragged out too far and this, combined with the illogical actions of our three main characters, brings a frustrating end to proceedings, rather than a frighteningly good climax.

Still, even though I found Dachra ultimately unsatisfying, I would like to see some follow-up work from Abdelhamid Bouchnak. The guy definitely shows some promise. 5.5/10.

Horror films aren't expected to be highly rated, and this wasn't a bad effort in this genre. The one fault I would say is the character development. What little there is of it just made the characters seem like they don't really get along very well, but they are supposed to be close.

Also, as pointed out by many reviews, it's just lazy to have the characters in a horror film always make poor decisions, or be oblivious to danger.

If the characters would have been better developed, and seen as getting along very well along with some jovial insults, instead of constant annoying bickering, the twist at the end would have had more impact.

Witchcraft is a thing in Africa, and it is scary. Tunisia is in North Africa, so it means something different to them. In the West, this type of thing is usually portrayed as devil worship.

All the other aspects such as atmosphere and cinematography were very good. I'd watch this film maker's next effort, he has promise.

Totally, the movie is good. I liked the story and the cast's acting but a point to review is the useless use of the bad words that was not necessary.

The concept was good but nothing new, most turkish horror movies rely on the same pattern. A slow pace direction with less stupid characters, might make it worth a watch.

I have seen thousands of horror films, but I do not recall a single one which begins, in quite a matter-of-fact-way, with the decapitation of a child (not explicitly shown, fortunately). That really got my attention.

A group of three film students visit a mental hospital in order to film a patient who is considered a witch, and based on a clue she provides seek out a remote hamlet. Once there, they find it to be inhabited by very strange residents and end up facing a horror far beyond anything they imagined...

It turns out that DACHRA, evidently Tunisia's first horror film, is very good at amplifying horror by presenting it in a mundane way, yet at the same time it oozes with atmosphere. Judging by the scarcity of horror movies which are successful in their attempts to do that, this is a credit to the film.

Also, I loved the feistiness of the female leader of the group during the interview with the hospital director. Unfortunately, by the end of the movie, her character has undergone an arc for the worse. In fact, the development of the characters and the poor choices they make are the weakest aspects of the movie. They fail to provide critical information to each other, they seem unreasonably unconcerned with the increasingly unsettling events they witness until there is no room left for ambiguity, and shortly before the end there is a twist which seems too implausible because it was not set up properly (for example, the twist contradicts the seeming surprise of one of the characters when he discovers they have been filmed while sleeping).

These flaws do not completely mitigate the strengths of the movie, they just reduce what could have been a great horror film to merely a good one. On a final note, DACHRA feels strongly like a found footage (FF) film without being one. As a FF fan, I appreciated the ambience.