Hood Witch desperately wants to be original, and I can’t say that it always fails in that effort. Through ample dramatic zoom-ins and the occasional artsy sH๏τ (often undermined by the melodramatic, parody-esque lighting), the Saïd Belktibia-directed film is trying to be a thriller, supernatural horror, social parable, family drama — the genre list goes painstakingly on — film, all at once. It never quite lands any of these beats, and I remain baffled at what they were trying to accomplish.

I’ll give the film credit: it does start off with pretty immediate intrigue. Protagonist Nour (Goldshifteh Farahani) and her son, Amine (Amine Zariouhi), are questioned by airport authorities, and when Nour is brought back, she opens her jacket to reveal dozens of reptiles in ziplock bags attached to her body. And so begins the story of an illegal animal smuggler who struggles to manage her relationship with her son’s dad with her commitment to a life of crime. At the same time, she is developing a mobile app that will connect users with mystical healers.

If that plot sounds far-fetched and out there as it stands that’s because it is. For a movie with such a hyper-specific storyline and interesting potential, I found myself consistently confused by Hood Witch. After all, illegally hiding giant lizards in a H๏τel room is bound to have some payoff, right? I could not have been more wrong.

Hood Witch’s Brash Tonal Contrasts Make It Hard To Get Into

The Movie Does Not Know What It Wants To Be

While I am all for a genre-blended film, I found the movie’s tonal clashes to be so extreme that it was hard to stay aligned with any character’s internal experience. In one sequence, Nour helps perform a violent exorcism on a young man, Kevin (Mathieu Espagnet). This scene is cross-cut with an awkward conversation between Amine and Jules (Denis Lavant), Kevin’s father. The dialogue scenes are starkly different in levels of severity, making both hard to get into.

The tonal contrasts do not stop there. After Kevin’s exorcism goes wrong, Hood Witch goes from being a vaguely horror-imbued thriller to an action film about halfway through. Even with a tense scene leading up to it, this is a pretty abrupt change, as now we go from vaguely mysterious mysticism to chase scenes and fistfights. SH๏τ in the movie’s characteristic low lighting and frenetic style, the fight choreography provides very little additional intrigue to the story.

Conveniently, Nour abandons her app idea at a similar rate, dissociating herself from the tool. While portrayed as an intense character decision, I’m guessing the screenwriters also realized that, at some point, the user base for those willing to put their information in an app that involves illegal animal activity was far too small for continuation. As such, they terminate a plot point that never made much sense to begin with as the film devolves into further haphazard chaos.

The Absurd Plot Made Me Feel Consistently Out Of Context

The Culturally Specific Details Were Poorly Defined

Speaking of the app, though, the tool is named “Baraka” — a name that seems significant but is never explained. Intrigued, I Googled this and found that the meaning of “baraka” that I imagine Hood Witch intends is not even the first result. As I eventually found myself on the term’s Wikipedia page, however, “baraka” or “barakah,” in Islam, refers to “the beneficent force from God that flows through the physical and spiritual spheres.”

Given the film’s occasional religious tie-ins, this name feels critical to understanding the app, but it’s never really explained. The app connects people with “marabouts,” another unexplained term that I now understand to be fairly regional to North and West Africa. While intriguing, I would have at least appreciated it if the film made an attempt to be a little less vague. The film certainly dedicates plenty of screentime to faux-social media montages about witchcraft, so they could have redirected some of these minutes to contextualizing moments like these.

That said, the action-thriller/family-drama/mystical-psychological-horror does not seem particularly committed to one theme, so this decontextualization may have been more emblematic of the lack of confidence the film had in its religious and spiritual themes.

The Script Does Not Support Golshifteh Farahani’s Potential

She’s Been Great Before

As a fan of hers since her incredible performance as Sepideh in Asghar Farhadi’s About Elly, I really wanted Farahani to come in and save this movie. While she is still a compelling dramatic actor, and easily the best part of the film, she is not given a script strong enough to support her potential. By Hood Witch‘s climax, the script has her literally just screaming constantly as an emotional response, undermining what could have been this mess of a movie’s one saving grace.