Horrmonger's Horror Corner

Kandisha (2020)

November 2, 2022
An overhead shot of four people standing around a Seal of Solomon carved into a floor covered in small, ornate blue rugs. A larger red Oriental-style rug is half-folded and being pulled away from the Seal.
A pretty by-the-numbers entity-summoning movie with just enough race and class commentary to keep things spicy.

Synopsis

Amélie, Bintou and Morjana are working-class teenagers trying to make the best of their summer break. When Amélie is assaulted she calls out to a force from Moroccan folklore: Aicha Kandisha, a vengeful man-killing spirit. Unfortunately, Aicha Kandisha won't stop at just the man who inspired the summoning.

Morjana, Amélie, and Bintou sitting closely together on a couch in front of a window. Morjana is olive-skinned with dark, pulled-back brown hair and a concerned expression, Amélie is light-skinned with long, wavy blonde hair, and Bintou is dark-skinned with long, smooth dreadlocks pulled back. Amélie is holding a tablet and Bintou is leaning in to look at it.

The characters

The characters are where this movie stumbles quite a bit, unfortunately. Most of the story is focused on Amélie but it shifts between the three main characters so often that she winds up feeling very diluted and no one feels very fleshed out (particularly Morjana). It can be hard to strike a balance between total mystery and overly-expository but this movie leans toward mystery to its detriment. Character history is hinted at but unimportant. What killed Morjana and Abdel's parents? Why are Amelie and Antoine's parents used as a punchline? I was once a rebellious and troublesome teenage girl so I was primed to connect with these characters, but either there's nothing there or my stinky American brain just can't make sense of what's provided.

The story

France has a pretty fucking bad Islamophobia problem if you weren't aware, and as far as I know the filmmakers are neither Muslim nor people of color, so it's difficult not to look askance at their choice to make a movie so deeply wedded to colonialism and Islam.

Where this movie had the most potential was its class and racial commentary. The most obvious read is that a white woman gets assaulted and multiple men of color pay for it with their lives (All but one of the men who die in this movie are non-white), but there's an interesting rub to it: Kandisha is explicitly described as not just a random killer, but an anti-colonial* historical figure who killed Portuguese soldiers in Morocco. Despite the legend claiming she’s taking revenge for the murder of her husband, she’s also described as assisting and avenging women in need.

So they took what was an objectively cool legend- a Moroccan woman who lost her husband and/or family to foreign invaders and seduced these soldiers so they could be killed- and decided she should be a killer ghost. Not just a killer ghost, either, but an indiscriminately bloodthirsty ghost who will kill children and people who are only tangentially linked to the summoner. Even though she should be regarded as a heroic figure her legacy has been twisted into that of an evil spirit who can only be stopped by the death of nine men or the woman who summoned her. This version of her- combination anti-colonial warrior, helper of abused women, and bloodthirsty killer- is certainly an...interesting take.

An old man in a hospital gown is standing at the nursery window, facing away with his left hand raised and touching the glass. The character Ben, a slim white man with dark hair, is standing next to a bassinet in a hospital nursery. He is looking toward the old man with a confused, alarmed expression. Kandisha is standing on Ben's left in a black niqab. A veil is covering the bottom half of her face and she is wearing a circlet across her forehead.

Incidentally, I couldn’t find a single source that says she helps abused women. In fact, every single source I found paints a picture of, essentially, a child-free La Llorona: a volatile water-adjacent spirit that seduces and kills men, though one major difference from La Llorona is that Aicha Kandisha can (according to some variations of the legend) be appeased, bargained with, and even married (though of course that comes with some conditions). She can be appealed to for wealth, removal of curses and spells, and magical powers. But you know what’s glaringly absent from her myth? Women. While I’m sure this is primarily caused by your usual patriarchal nonsense, it is noteworthy that her interactions revolve around men and there’s not a single mention I could find of helping women specifically, let alone abused women.

Sadly, the various topics this movie aims at- class, race, misogyny, colonialism- don't get enough time or respect and ultimately fall flat. As the deaths feel more and more tacked-on the messaging is pushed aside for the sake of resolving the story, and the characters rarely feel like much more than paper dolls.

Kandisha towering over Recteur in her final form. She is at least seven feet tall and is mostly obscured by shadow, with long, shaggy dark hair, and a veil covering the bottom half of her face. Her arms and most of her midsection are bare, with ragged clothing elsewhere. Recteur is facing away from the camera. He is wearing a white suit jacket and there is a well-groomed goatee visible. They are standing in a dimly-lit room with large, colorful graffiti tags on the walls.

The Good Stuff™

Despite all my problems with it, Kandisha had a few things I really liked:

Closing thoughts

I think how you interpret Kandisha shapes the meaning of the rest of the movie, so you must first figure out what she represents to you. Is she purely a symbol of violent revenge? The collateral damage of vengeance? Racial violence? Islamic superstition? Feminist rage???? Is she a cautionary tale about people getting swept up in murderous witch hunts? A warning to all men oppressing women generally and hijabi specifically? Is this a post-MeToo anti-feminist screed about men’s lives being ruined by sexual assault accusations? Maybe she’s a reminder that racialized violence doesn’t care about your social class. Maybe she’s just a shitty caricature from a country notorious for both systemic and structural hatred of Muslims.

As Paste Magazine's Natalia Keogan much more skillfully put it:

“There is a subtle hint of Islamophobia inherent in the premise of the entity terrorizing this French city being a Arabic woman donning religious garb, as it immediately brings forth recent legislative restrictions in the country involving what Muslim women can and can’t wear in a “secular” environment. Unlike Cohen-Olivar**, Maury and Bustillo have the distinction of not hailing from the country they are borrowing folklore from, relegating some of the film’s engagement with the legend and how it intersects with Islamic practice to sensationalistic and shaky ground. Their efforts to superficially engage with the Moroccan-sourced mythology of Kandisha also can’t salvage the dismissal of her initial struggle against Western rule—a throughline which could have brought forth an engaging discussion of France’s imperial past and current xenophobia.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Content warnings

Animal death, sexual assault/attempted rape.

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