Achoura is a Moroccan-French co-production that is a gothic, dark, fantasy horror film. Talal Selhami co-wrote and directed the film, which was released in 2018. Ali is played by Younes Bouab, Nadia is played by Sofia Manousha, Samir is played by Omar Lotfi, and Stephane is played by Ivan Gonzalez.
The name Achoura refers to a religious festival in Morocco, not the monster from the film. Ashura Day, also known as Zamzam Day in some parts of Morocco, falls on the tenth day of Muharram. People shower water on each other on this day, and children go out in groups to spray water on strangers.
As the film progresses, you will notice how vital water is to the plot. With the exception of the first scene, the movie does not focus much on Ashura Day. The film follows four friends, one of whom, Samir, becomes separated from the others on Ashura Day. They reunite with their long-lost friend after twenty-five years, but all is not well because Samir is the host of an evil djinn-like entity.
The Chicago Cinepocalypse Festival hosted the film’s North American debut. Despite the fact that it was released in 2018, the film was completed in 2015. However, the film “IT,” which came out after “Achoura,” was uncannily similar to “Achoura.” Given that “IT” is based on a well-known Stephen King novel and was released before “Achoura,” “Achoura” is overshadowed by the terrifying killer clown.
Seven children experience a homicidal clown in the 2017 film “IT,” which causes them to confront their own demons later. As each character deals with their trauma following their encounter with the djinn-like entity, “Achoura” is similar.
However, “Achoura” and “IT” are separated by a number of characteristics, the most notable of which are cultural and religious. To get the full experience of this Moroccan tradition, we will break down the film and discuss the beast that haunts the cast in this video.
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The Creature Returned To Hunt – Achoura 2018
The movie begins with four kids gathered around a bonfire for a Moroccan titular religious celebration called the ‘Child’s Night’. We then see a young girl named Bashira who was married despite her young age. She wasn’t a part of the four kids who had gathered around the bonfire by the way. Bashira liked another guy of her age called Jineb. Jineb asks Bashira to run away with her but she couldn’t do it. So, Bashira gives Jineb a whistle to use whenever he misses her.
Bashira’s husband tracks them down to the bonfire venue, so the two kids run through the cornfield and into an abandoned building to save themselves. However, her husband isn’t too far behind. He finds them and beats Jineb up. As he is about to kill him, Bashira hits her husband from behind and knocks him out. She rushes to Jineb and he watches a creature materialize in Bashira. The djinn-like creature takes Bashira away.
The scene shifts and we are brought to the present. The four kids, Ali, Nadia, Stephane, and Samir, who were present at the bonfire are adults now. Ali is a detective who is seen investigating a case similar to what had happened to Nadia.
A kid playing football enters an abandoned place where he finds a strange man whose mouth was locked. The man turns out to be Samir. An old man intervenes and sends the kid away. He then tries to beat Samir up with a plank of wood but hesitates. Samir is given some water to drink instead, after which, we see something weird move inside his stomach. Pretty sure he wasn’t pregnant.
Ali and Nadia were married with a kid called Yusuf. Their marital relationship was far from great, however. The next day, Nadia goes to Stephane’s art exhibition and looks at his creepy paintings of a bald humanoid creature with dark eyes and a melting mouth. The art depicts the affected kids from the incident that Ali was investigating. Nadia begins to feel uncomfortable and decides to leave.
The scene shifts to a flashback from Nadia’s childhood. The kids were about to celebrate their cultural festival when they began talking about the story behind the house they were in. The film is a co-production of France and Morocco and as you may already know, Morocco used to be a French colony. The kids talk about that and mention how the house belonged to French soldiers. These soldiers used to treat the Moroccans terribly until a creature showed up and killed everyone. The creature was also responsible for many kids going missing.
Ali looks at a locket that says ‘Nadia loves Stephane’.
The scene shifts back to the present where the kid returns to Samir and finds him in possession of the same locket. He unlocks the lock around his mouth and the creature in Samir’s stomach, now unleashed, attacks the kid.
Ali and his boss, Majid, investigate another incident with the creature. A family looks at the reports by the detectives on TV. Suddenly, there’s a knock on the door. The man sends his kid to their room and gets the door cautiously and calls the police. Just then, he hears his child scream. Samir breaks the door and enters the house to look for something. The parents go to the child’s room and find the child to be missing.
Ali reaches his headquarters in the next scene where he finds Samir, arrested. He hugs his old friend on seeing him after fifteen years. Samir tells Ali about the creature and calls it ‘the bogeyman’. He also tells Ali about the locket. A flashback scene tells us that Nadia liked Stephane since they were kids but Stephane had emotionally distanced himself ever since Samir went missing.
We finally get to the origin of Samir’s story. Samir had found a girl in the cornfield, who was none other than Bashira. Bashira takes Samir and co. to the abandoned building from the first scene, asking for help for her friend. Over there, they find a man with a lock around his mouth. He unlocks it and the creature comes out of his stomach. It begins to swallow Samir but Nadia throws water balloons at it. It leaves Samir and escapes in a way that makes it look scared.
A man barges in with the whistle that Bashira had given to Jineb. It turns out to be an adult Jineb. The whistle’s sound contains the creature inside Samir and they lock his mouth. They try to save Samir but fail, which was a reason why the other three people had grown up with a lot of guilt. Jineb takes Samir away.
The flashback ends and we see Ali speaking to Nadia on call. Nadia tells him that she could now recall all of these past incidents, which she had forgotten as a trauma response. Ali tries to reach Nadia who was with a kid in the school where she worked. The little girl goes to the washroom and Nadia hears her scream. She goes to find the kid and encounters the creature from the past, once again. The creature was almost about to hit Nadia when Jineb intervenes and switches on the fire alarm.
The water from the sprinklers scares the creature away. Ali comes in and mistakes Jineb to be the perpetrator. The creature materializes behind Ali and Jineb tries to take out his whistle but Ali misunderstands it as Jineb’s stance for attacking and shoots him.
Jineb dies and Ali realizes his mistake. He uses the whistle to protect himself and rushes to Samir. He intends to leave with his friend. Samir is taken to his brother, Stephane. They take their child, Yusuf, as well. Stephane hugs Samir when the creature reappears. It tries to attack them when Ali uses the whistle to contain the creature in Samir.
This time, Samir breaks down emotionally and begins to consider himself the cause of all the misfortune. He thinks that his death would cause the creature in him to die as well and commits suicide by jumping off a window. But it worsens things, as the creature is now free without the host. It attacks and takes away Yusuf.
The three head towards the house that once belonged to the French soldiers. They find Yusuf amidst heaps of bones when the creature reappears and attacks them. Bashira also materializes from the creature’s body and it turns out that she was haunting people. Stephane and Nadia pull Bashira out of the creature successfully. However, the creature then kills Stephane and turns into ash.
A possessed Bashira begins to bang Nadia’s head against the wall. She then contains the creature’s ashes and he is born again. Before he can kill Nadia, Ali controls the creature with the whistle. With no options left, he contains the creature inside Yusuf.
In the end, we see Ali and Nadia leave their home to go to a far-away place with their son, Yusuf, who had the same lock-in his mouth as Samir. The movie ends.
The movie’s unique selling point lies in the way the story has been narrated. The constant to and fro between the present and the flashbacks reveals bits and pieces of information about the creature.
The performances by the actors, both the adults and the children, are another remarkable feature of this Moroccan film. The addition of a little bit of Moroccan lore with reference to the French works well, but elaborating on it wouldn’t have hurt either.
The movie does not have the most satisfying ending if what you’re looking for is resolution. However, the premise is bleak from the beginning, as we see a full-grown man married to a little girl, on the verge of killing a little boy.
The entire story revolving around Samir is particularly heartbreaking. He is constantly seen in distress, ever since he became the host for the creature. He lives in terrible conditions. He spent twenty-five years away from his friends and in the end, his death is meaningless as it just makes things worse for the cast. However, his death was necessary as it showed how grim the movie actually is.
The Djinn like Monster
The primary antagonist in the movie “Achoura” is a spirit-like creature. In some ways, the creature is similar to the djinn, a sort of supernatural spirit or demon. Every culture has its own malevolent spirit, for example, ‘the bogeyman’ in the West and the ‘Oni’ of Japan.
Similarly, the djinn is considered to be an evil, supernatural creature in an Islamic context, and is often mentioned alongside the devils. The conception may vary as occasionally djinns can be benevolent in certain folklore. But generally, they are evil spirits who are held responsible for diseases, misfortune, and possession.
This human body possession by the djinn is a concept that has inspired several horror movies, “The Creature” being one of them. “The creature” isn’t exactly the same as a djinn though. Or maybe it is. Not much has been elaborated about its origin or goals.
In folklore, djinns belong to a world different from the one humans live in. When they possess a human, the host is unable to speak properly and tends to have seizures. In the movie, we see the creature possessing the hosts but the characteristics of the creature stray away from that of the djinn when we think about how the hosts behave. Samir is able to speak coherently, as we see when he speaks with Ali.
The djinn brings misfortune though and of course, when you host a dangerous creature in you, your life is likely to be miserable. Not just yours, but the lives of those who care about you are at risk as well. It’s not likely to make you go bankrupt and attract other miseries but being a host changes your life for the worse drastically, and that is more than bad enough.
The creature hunts for children and feeds on them. As the movie cuts to the present day, this is the case that Ali investigates. The creature shows up at homes with young children around the age of ten to twelve and feeds on them. Its primary intentions remain in the dark, however.
Why does it feed on children? Why does it stay in Samir? Does it need a host to survive? These are the burning questions that come to mind. By the looks of it, we can assume that the creature feeds on children for its survival. Maybe it cannot feed on beings of other age groups. Maybe it just doesn’t like to feed on adult humans. Maybe the adults aren’t delicious enough.
The creature has a host in the movie on a number of occasions because it had to be contained to save the children. And the only way to contain it was a host and a whistle, that could control the spirit. With the whistle, Ali and Jineb control the spirit of the creature and they bind it inside Samir and in the end, in Yusuf. Then, a lock is placed around their mouth and they are kept in isolation to prevent the spirit from coming out.
One such place where the hosts are generally kept is the old French house, where the French soldiers lived back when Morocco was a French colony. The place was abandoned, making it an ideal place to keep the host of the creature.
The creature has a weakness, apart from the whistle that can control it. Water. It doesn’t like water. It was low-key scared when Nadia attacked it with water balloons. In another scene, Jineb sets off the sprinklers by breaking the fire alarm, causing the water from the sprinklers to scare the creature away. As the movie references ‘Ashura Day’ or ‘Zamzam Day’, it makes sense why the evil spirit is warded off by the holy water.
The creature had possessed Nadia and she had succumbed to its darkness, which is why it was banging Nadia’s head against the wall despite being pulled out. It was also immortal, probably. When it had turned into ash, Bashira had gathered those ashes again which allowed the creature to re-materialize.
On the other hand, the death of the host while the creature possessed them did not help either. Samir, who had a massive breakdown thinking that everything was his fault had committed suicide. He hoped for it to kill the creature inside him but it didn’t work out as Samir died and now the creature was unleashed. The only way to deal with it was by locking it in another host.
The character design of the creature stands out. Not in a visual way but in an abstract manner. Several scenes of the movie are shot in the dark with shadowy photography, so, when the spirit of the creature materializes, the creature sometimes blends in with the surroundings, making it a more formidable foe.
In other instances, we get to see its face. The entire body of the creature is black while the face looks like a white mask. The mouth area branches out into open protrusions from the skin, revealing a spot in the mouth that looks similar to the mouths of the unevolved ‘demo dogs’ in “Stranger Things”.
To make matters creepier, when the creature was inside its host, it generally lived in the stomach and squirmed around that area. Being fed with meat and vegetables instead of children was not its favorite diet to go on.
It can also re-materialize itself very soon after being warded off, which is why Ali had to use Yusuf as the last resort and ended up containing the creature in his own son. What a fight for the Best Dad of the Year Award!
Why Should You Watch Achoura?
“Achoura” is Morocco’s very first monster film and watching movies revolving around the folktales of different cultures is always a splendid thing to do. That way, we get to hear more stories and know more about the interesting and grim details that are commonplace in another country.
From a critical perspective, the creature received positive reviews from several publications. As there are very few characters in the movie, everyone gets the platform to shine. Ali takes the lead as the investigator. Nadia finds herself in several situations where she has to face the creature. Stephane’s childhood love with Nadia, and him being Samir’s brother adds weight to the story. Samir being the host of the creature makes him one of the most important characters, and it all begins with Bashira and Jineb.
Every other child or adult present in the movie such as Yusuf and Majid are responsible for moving the plot forward and no one is expendable. The movie is also somber and builds a lot of suspense as it flows. Nothing is revealed at once and it builds the curiosity to learn more about the creature.
Death of Innocence is a very common theme in the movie, adding to its already grim nature. The three kids, notably Nadia, forget about the incident with Samir succumbing to the creature as a trauma response. It is not uncommon for people to blank out traumatic memories as a coping mechanism. The characters consider themselves guilty for their friend’s misfortune and that plagues their lives. This makes certain factors of the movie very realistic as well.
Samir’s character, in particular, stands out amongst others, causing us to empathize with him but fear the monster inside him at the same time, and in the end, his meaningless death adds to the sorrow.
The movie evokes several emotions in the watcher, which makes “Achoura” a must-watch horror. It is great to venture into movies from other countries.
What did you think about this movie? Did you enjoy this video? If yes, then don’t forget to like and comment on this video. Till then, goodbye. And have a nice one!