Dachra (2018) (Tunisia)

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A university assignment has journalism student Yasmine and two classmates looking into a cold case. A woman is found barely alive, naked and mutilated with her throat slit on the side of a road some 20 years earlier. She now resides in an asylum, where her strange aggressive behavior and penchant for speaking in tongues has her labeled as a witch. The young facility director refuses to acknowledge the patient even exists but a little bribing of the guards gets them access to the woman who supposedly isn’t even there. As far as interviews go with possibly supernatural insane women who haven’t spoken in twenty years… it’s kinda standard. Yasmine gets too close showing the woman a map and gets her arm scratched up while the woman mumbles “It’s you”. On the successful end of things, the woman used Yasmine’s blood to mark an “x” on the map. The trio head out to the middle of nowhere and right into the isolated countryside compound village of Dachra. They have a hard time finding the spot but after wandering around the woods and bickering for a bit, they get into a foot chase with a little girl (discovered chewing on a bird) in the middle of the woods and are lead to the small community inhabited by silent women, drying meats and an energetic nutball named Saber who runs things. He invites them to stay for dinner and it’s a meat-filled feast which may just make you swear off meat for the rest of your life. Against Yasmine’s wishes, they stay the night in an empty building belonging to Saber’s dead brother and plan on leaving at dawn. You don’t need me to tell you how this goes. A few creepy moments have Yasmine nervous but they make it through the night, unfortunately they have a hard time getting out the next day. While this is going on, Yasmine’s grandpa knows something awful is happening and attempts to make it to his granddaughter. There’s family secrets, nightmares of a woman in black, a worried grandpa, a creepy kid, a diary full of exposition and an undeniable blanket of dread covering everything. It’s a plot I’ve come across a few dozen times but woven from the hands of a culture I’m not familiar with, which makes me happy as hell to give it a go. I’m a little shocked it hasn’t been remade in America as a found footage flick because the story is set up to be one but with the talent working behind the camera (no discredit to the strong cast), I’m happy they allowed themselves to go beyond the limitations of handheld horror. Grandpa bears a small resemblance to Mel Ferrar and Saber looks like a Tunisian Jesse L. Martin and I’m a fan of that. Sound design and camerawork provide an efficiently eerie atmosphere to everything and does well to make the long buildup to the revelation worth your time and the nasty bits hit like a hammer blow to the side of the head.