 | MOVIE DETAILS • Name: Achoura • Year: 2018 • Country: Morocco, France • Director: Talal Selhami • Main cast: Sofiia Manousha, Younes Bouab, Omar Lotfi, Iván González • Runtime: 90 minutes • Production company: Moon & Deal Films, Black Lab VFX, Orange Studio, Overlook Films, World in Progress Films • TRAILER |
After having watched the movie Achoura (2018) I think the line calling it as It (2017) meets The Babadook (2014) is pretty accurate. Kids having a traumatic supernatural experience that get back together as adults to deal with the ghosts of the past, yeah, we’ve seen that before. And the archetypal of the monster resembles and reminds the Babadook. Of course, Achoura (2018) has a story of its own but those two references are always in mind while watching the movie.
This supernatural horror movie is based on a Moroccan legend where an evil creature, a Djinn, feeds up from little children. But the Arabic side of the movie pretty much ends here, besides many characters speaking the Arabic language, because this is pretty much a French horror movie, with the characters acting very French, a very French detective, and a very European development of the story. So if you are looking for something very exotic and different you should pass on this one.
Achoura (2018) is well written, well acted, well filmed, and the special effects of the creature are efficient. It has a plot that keeps you in tension thought the entire running time and there are a few scary moments to chill your spine. But there is not much more behind this. The story is some sort of pastiche from the different horror movies of this kind, and it doesn’t have any distinctive value from everything we have seen before. This makes the watching of the movie an entertaining experience but also easy to forget once the ending credits start to roll.
To present the movie, the co-writer and director Talal Selhami has said “The times we are living in are going through a terrible period, between economic crisis, terrorism, disease, natural disasters, and the Arab world is unfortunately not spared. That is why I think that the Arab world also has today, and more than ever, its own fantastic stories to tell”. That background of a damaged society whose values have lost the virtue is there, it is the world we live in. But that never takes a direct part in the story development in Achoura (2018). What we have here is a routine horror movie with its good moments and almost not a flaw. But it won’t outstand from the rest of the horror production out there. Entertaining but inconsequential.
RATE: 5/10
IMDB URL: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4188180
