As unfair as it may seem, especially as it's not aiming to be the same type of movie (not really), Dachra is a film that suffers most by seeming to follow too closely in the footsteps of The Blair Witch Project. It's about a trio of journalism students who head off on the trail of a hot story (one about a woman who was kept in a local asylum and tried to bite anyone who came close to her), leading them to an isolated woodland village where things aren't what they seem. You get frustrations among the group, you get things found in the woods that seem bloody and scary, and you get a gradual splintering until we're waiting to see the fate of one main character.
Yassmine Dimassi plays Yassmine, Aziz Jebali plays Walid, and Bilel Slatnia plays Bilel, making up the central threesome. They're required to wander around and put up with excuses that keep them stuck in the local area for far too long, all for the sake of getting everything ready for the finale.
Writer-director Abdelhamid Bouchnak, making his feature debut, perhaps hoped to make a strong impression with this Tunisian horror movie by simply making a Tunisian horror movie (they're quite few and far between, from what I can gather), but he fails to play to his strengths. The script is weak, the location isn't used well, and there's nothing that feels as believable as it should. This should be a simple and easy concept to buy into, yet it rings false.
Most of the first half feels unnecessary. The runtime here is 114 minutes, and this could have easily been trimmed down to a better, pacier, 90-minute experience. Bouchnak does well with individual scare moments here and there though, a few daydream/nightmare images standing out, as well as some visions that Yassmine has throughout. It's when the creepiness is set aside for some more blood and guts that things falter.
Dimassi, Jebali, and Slatnia do just fine in their roles, although it's hard to judge them based on the material they have to work with, but they suffer most from a lack of any characterisation beyond the surface level stuff. Dimassi is given some more to do, especially in some interesting scenes with her grandfather (Bahri Rahali, who does very well), but she's the only one. The others could have been swapped for any other supporting characters with much the same end result.
It's a shame that this doesn't quite work. You can feel Bouchnak probing for just the right amount of dread, just the right scares, throughout, and he certainly deserves points for trying. Considering my comparison in the very first paragraph of this review, the fact that he didn't settle on the found footage format for his tale is enough in itself to gain him a little bit of goodwill. Perhaps his next outing will be stronger than this, and he may yet have something really great to deliver to genre fans soon.
5/10
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