Dachra — Dachra(VOD)

Dachra comes to Arrow Player with an impressive pedigree. The Tunisian horror was chosen as the closing film for International Critics' Week at the 2018 Venice International Film Festival and won the Scariest Film Award at The Overlook Film Festival the following year.

It certainly wears its horror credentials on its sleeve, packed as it is with nods and homages to occidental horror movies, from Don’t Look Now to The Woman in Black. But while the film’s poster, prominently featuring the lead’s eye, has a distinctly giallo feel, it’s another part of Dario Argento’s work that casts the longest shadow. Like Argento’s ‘Three Mothers’ trilogy, Dachra conjures up witchcraft, dream sequences, hidden rituals and, at its centre, a young woman in peril.

That woman is Yasmine (Yasmine Dimassi), who, along with her journalism student friends Walid (Aziz Jbali) and Belil (Bilel Slatnia), unwisely investigates rumours of witchcraft for a university project. The hook is a mysterious patient at a psychiatric institution who has been labelled a witch since being found mutilated on a remote roadside 20 years before.

A harrowing visit to see the woman leads the trio to the spot where she was discovered and the isolated community of Dachra. It’s a place where the women don’t speak, the men are eager to welcome visitors with a meal of their curious dried meat, and the students find it increasingly hard to leave.

Director Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s debut feature could have crumbled under its influences, but some confident touches keep it afloat. Dachra isn’t a found footage film, but the first half draws on the style with a washed-out look and disorienting framing, where characters are sometimes only partially in shot or the action is observed from outside corridors. It helps conjure a compelling sense of voyeurism that runs throughout, even as the tension ratchets up, the edit becomes more frenetic, and the film’s palette expands. More than once, the cinematography and sound combine for effective red herrings and notable scares. In one unsettling scene, an anticipated visual jump is hijacked by some creepy sound design.

But what stands out most is the bickering. There’s barely a respite from the central trio ripping parts out of each other. While The Blair Witch Project (an inevitable influence) took its characters from fun to fear as the horror grew, Dachra has them squabbling throughout. It’s a risky gambit, as none of them come near to being likeable.

There is, at least, a partial pay-off to those character dynamics in the third act, but it can be wearing, and for some, it will detract from the slow drip of disturbing magical horror. Far more successful is the meshing of folk horror with Islam, particularly through Yasmine’s grandfather (Bahri Rahali), which adds a fascinating texture and could have been further explored.

In the third act, revelations come thick and fast, betraying the fact that during the film’s generous run time (nearly two hours), the bickering trio’s investigations only really take them to a couple of places. Viewers may well know how they feel. To check out the film on Arrow player, head here