Women have been equated with witches for centuries now. The opening credit of Saïd Belktibia’s “Hood Witch (Roqya)” establishes that in a matter of a few seconds – running us through all the blame that has been put upon women just because some of them decide to stand up to the regressive nature of the patriarchy, refusing to be controlled. The idea with which the film begins is an interesting one too.
In Paris, Nour (Golshifteh Farahani) makes a living selling exotic animals – lizards, snakes, frogs, and other reptiles – to healers who use them in their witchcraft and exorcism processes. She is estranged from her abusive husband Dylan (Jérémy Ferrari) who often comes in her way threatening her of copping her out for her scheming ways. In hindsight, he wants to have sole custody of their son Amine (Amine Zariouhi).
Amine is fond of his mother, and occasionally helps her build an app named “Barakha,” which connects people with healers. Amine is not scared of the animals that keep scrimmaging around in Nour’s place or the risky business she is up to – all because there’s a sense of trust and love he shares with her. Religious fatalists and people who know Dylan keep trying to bring Nour down, but because she is such a well-sought person – knows her way around things, and doesn’t take anyone’s shit – she is somehow able to dodge the constant mini-attacks that come to her way.
That is until an exorcism she organizes for a young neighborhood boy named Kevin (Mathieu Espagnet) goes horribly wrong. Tragedy strikes when Kevin’s father Jules’ (played by legendary French actor Denis Lavant) remarks make Nour’s life a living hell, forcing her to take the route of running for her life. However, being the strong-headed woman that she is, none of these blame games, or random witch hunts bothers her. But, when her son is taken away from her, an enigma erupts in her.
Now, Saïd Belktibia, who starred in the anxiety-inducing Netflix thriller “Athena,” tries to imbibe his film with a similar kind of urgency. Once the main plot kicks in, the film turns into one long chase sequence. However, unlike “Athena,” “Hood Witch” wasn’t introduced to us in that way. There is a clear distinction in the themes, tones, and narrative turns that Belktibia’s messy film takes.
After laying down strong and loaded feminist themes including the supposed reason for Nour getting rallied away like she is because she is an immigrant, director Belktibia abandons it halfway. Similarly, social media as a modern way to illicit and force the old ways is such an interesting plot thread. However, these themes are only introduced into the narrative and never explored properly.
At some point, the film also tries to draw a distinctive picture of whether witcraft – at least in the context of the film – is real or not. However, even that aspect of the film is tossed away midway, making the final result feel contrived and unengaging. I used to think that Golshifteh Farahani could make anything seem watchable. The Iranian-French actor has such a magnetic screen presence that she can uplift dire projects with no sense of direction into something more concrete.
In “Hood Witch”, she tries her best to drive all the prospective threads into a whole by truly making it about a mother’s fight for her survival and ensuring that her son is away from all the obnoxious rules set by the patriarchy. But even in the film’s best moments, you see the narrative hold slipping away, even for someone as great as Farahani. The result is a sloppy film that has no idea what to do with itself.
