Studio: Shudder
Director: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Writer: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Producer: Wassim Beji, Delphine Clot, Guillaume Lemans
Stars: Mathilde La Musse, Suzy Bemba, Samarcande Saadi, Meriem Sarolie, Sandor Funtek, Walid Afkir, Felix Glaux-Delporto
Review Score:
Summary:
Three best friends inadvertently invoke a vengeful demon who threatens to violently kill their male friends and family.
Review:
Call it a curse, bad luck, or possibly poor business deals, but French filmmaking duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo seem to get the shaft every time they make a movie. 2007’s “Inside” (review here) thrust them into the splatter spotlight. Their 2011 follow-up “Livide” (review here) could have kept them there, except Dimension still sits on it over a decade later as the film has yet to see an official North American release. A similar fate almost befell “Among the Living” (review here), which played at SXSW in 2014, but other audiences didn’t see until it showed up on Shudder three years later. Also in 2017, “Leatherface” (review here) appeared poised to be their big English-language break, but “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” stakeholders looked at the lukewarm response and decided to take the franchise in a different direction (again) by ignoring their installment altogether. And we’re only talking about made movies here, not false starts like “Halloween II” or a “Hellraiser” reboot, both of which had Maury and Bustillo attached at one point yet never came to fruition.
For their sakes, I’m glad to see the two of them tiring of Hollywood’s runaround and returning to their indie horror roots with “Kandisha,” a simple supernatural slasher loosely based on an under-the-radar Moroccan legend. The movie is only mildly frightening, and moderately flawed. At least Maury and Bustillo are back to basics with their signature style of cinematic slaughter, and not going on goose chases to appease unappreciative moneymen who prefer putting their projects on shelves instead of putting them out to the public.
Something I cited with “Among the Living” was that script’s usage of problematic language and behavior to connect its young protagonists with camaraderie. “Among the Living” meant to be an Amblin adventure with a “Friday the 13th” feel, but its characters came off as “deviant dickheads” because they peed on each other for condescending cackles, used “f*ggot” as an insult, and plotted to burn down an old farmer’s barn just because they didn’t like him. Believe me, I’m not an oversensitive pearl-clutcher about things like this. I simply see a conflict of intention versus actuality when people I’m supposed to root for act like obnoxious a-holes.
With Maury and Bustillo up to old tricks, this becomes a problem that plagues “Kandisha” too. The circle of friends surrounding main trio Amelie, Bintou, and Morjana is older, likely late teens or early twenties. Yet they’re almost as immature as “Among the Living’s” grade-school kids. Nicknames are based on race, with one person dubbed “Arab” and another called “Blackie.” “Blackie” bears the additional brunt of a wisecrack about Black people having AIDS. Someone also jokes about the demon named Kandisha by suggesting they summon a cleaning lady ghost named Conchita to “clean up their sh*t.”
Like “Among the Living,” maybe an argument can be made that this is how friends of that age actually talk. But when it comes to making fictional folks endearing instead of unappealing, there’s an uncomfortable line between playful teasing and race-based bullying that “Kandisha” crosses, which is unfortunate to see since the cast is so diverse. If not for their crudeness, the vast variation of religions, ethnicities, and social statuses could be an exemplary melting pot of characters.
The issue could also be a cultural difference between what counts as acceptable insult comedy in one country versus another. In post-2020 America though, it’s difficult to not hear a distracting siren in your head as soon as someone speaks a slur, even when it’s in jest between buddies.
Bad balancing acts don’t stop there. “Kandisha” also encounters some difficulty differentiating between essential exposition and banal background that doesn’t need to be bothered with. The film’s first act spends an inordinate amount of time setting up each girl’s personal life, including what’s going on in their respective homes. Then the movie keeps going until we also learn more than we need to about every one of their friends, a lot of which isn’t flattering.
I can appreciate when a horror film takes time for trivialities to some degree so I’m not sitting there wondering why we should care about someone we know nothing about. But I don’t understand why “Kandisha’s” camera would linger on ancillary characters giving each other guff when such a scene adds nothing notable to the main woman we’re supposed to be focused on. I guess it’s nice to know Morjana has a job as a nurse at a hospital, or that her brother is obsessed with the gym. But do those things have something significant to say about those people, or are they only excuses to establish locations where later moments take place?
“Kandisha” doesn’t have a hint of horror until the 16-minute mark, when the leading ladies finally stumble upon the myth of a woman who bonded with a demon to get revenge on the men who martyred her. A certain circumstance inspires one of them to test the truth, and her half-inadvertent invocation unleashes the titular terror to tear apart the males in their lives whether they deserve it or not.
That becomes another peculiar problem. Men soon start dying and we don’t know why. Considering how much time we spend with most of these males in that first scene of vaguely hateful kvetching at a café, you’d think “Kandisha” would suggest some reason why they’d be targets for supernatural assassination. A shared secret hidden in their past? A collective conspiracy to be revealed down the line? Other than the first victim, no explanation ever comes for why these men are murdered.
SPOILERS
This creates another conundrum regarding the movie’s mythology. Because there’s often a number involved with these kinds of curses, we eventually learn that once she is summoned, Kandisha will take the lives of six men. I’m not sure if I forgot how to do math correctly or if the film did, but Kandisha does kill six men, seven if you also include the Muslim imam who fails an exorcism. So unless something was lost in subtitle translation or I completely missed it, why does everyone worry about Amelie’s brother and the imam’s son being murdered when Kandisha has more than fulfilled her quota?
END SPOILERS
Even with occasionally off-putting heroines and bald spots in its story, “Kandisha” earns a routine score because it’s a routine spook show. One thing about Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo is they rarely hit hurdles on the technical end of their craft. “Kandisha” slows through a few predictable stretches, but it always looks slick, boasting a few good gruesome bits to even out lame lightning flashes and other basic boos that are part and parcel with potboiler paranormal activity.
Had Blumhouse produced the project, and had it starred a few TV-famous faces from The CW, “Kandisha” would have made a respectable amount of money over two or three theatrical weekends. It’s standard slumber party stuff chock full of angsty young friends, a Ouija-adjacent summoning, a vengeful spirit, you know the drill. But these are the streamlined shockers Maury and Bustillo got good at making. Big studios churning out mainstream chillers would be head over heels in love with them by now if the blinds hadn’t been closed on nearly all of their previous efforts.
Review Score: 60
At least the movie only runs 70 minutes, though I suppose that extra 10 technically disqualifies it from being a literal amateur hour.