THE INVOCATION OF ENVER SIMAKU documents the effort of a man who tries to find out what exactly happened during a particular night in 1997 when his wife and dozens of local Albanian villagers were murdered by a seeming madman, and a period of upheaval began in the entire country.
This is a slow-burn story which takes its time to follow various leads and in the meanwhile introduces us to various topics of Albanian culture, geography and history. For a movie that is not a real documentary, it contains quite a lot of such information, and I found this aspect the most interesting. Now I know, for example, that Albania during Communist times was declared the world's first atheist country, prohibiting the exercise of religion altogether until the regime's downfall in 1990; that superstition and belief in folk myths such as the kukuth, a demon-like creature that is supposed to make people do horrible things, began to occupy the vacuum of belief in at least in some people; and that the fall of the Albanian right-wing government in 1997 was catalyzed by the failure of Ponzi schemes and subsequent losses in which the overwhelming majority of the population had invested based on the irresponsible endorsement by their government.
When it comes to the story itself, it doesn't generate too much excitement, save for a couple of unsettling scenes, of which the seeming slow emergence of a kukuth from behind a couch (or was it just the imagination?) is probably the most notable. The ending, which recapitulates the beginning, seems to have been conceived as poetic but ends up being anticlimactic.
The film is at pains to say that it is based on true events. Whether it really is or not I can't tell, but all the background info I checked turned out correct. So, this is probably most suited for people who like to learn more about other cultures in general and Albania in particular.
