‘Hood Witch’ SXSW 2024 Review: A Disappointing Tale About Modern Magic
At the start of French filmmaker Saïd Belktibia’s Hood Witch, we follow single mother Nour (Golshifteh Farahani) and her son are they’re stopped by airport security. Noticing something moving in Nour’s jacket, the TSA officer asks her to slowly strip down. She smirks and takes off her jacket, revealing that she’s strung all sorts of exotic animals across her body, from bearded dragons to scorpions all tucked away in plastic bags. It’s an arresting image and is also indicative of the problems that befall Hood Witch as a whole, namely that it hosts many compelling themes seeking a better home than what this story and screenplay can provide. Like the mini zoo that Nour carries, there are glimpses of exciting and salient commentary, but the film frustratingly circles the drain on a narrative that isn’t as interesting as the ideas it embodies.
After that opening sequence, we follow Nour and her son as they head back to their home. Nour makes her living by smuggling and selling illegal animals, but her dabbling with poisonous dart frogs and tarantulas is just a way to fund the work she’s truly passionate about: creating an app that connects ailing individuals to mystical healers.
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The app is a success, with people able to get matched with healers in their local areas to solve problems ranging from physical ailments to spiritual attacks. It’s a clever showcase of the ways witchcraft is alive and well and like any other “service”, must change with the times (i.e. it needs good SEO and marketing). Belktibia effectively underscores this by weaving in scenes of people’s testimonies with the service through interspersing TikToks and Instagram reels.
An interesting narrative wrinkle is that Nour herself does not believe in the power of the spiritual services she’s offering. She exploits her client’s pain for her own survival. The “cures” she offers come from the properties she extracts from the exotic animals she traffics, such as utilizing a dart frog’s poison to cure sickness. Hood Witch shines when it focuses on these scenes as it questions the effectiveness and role of spiritual services like prayer and benedictions when it comes to counteracting embodied pain.
The main drama of the film comes when one client, Kevin (Mathieu Espagnet), requests help through the app. Whether he’s genuinely plagued by a spiritual force or is simply having a bad day is left up to the viewer’s interpretation. But the pain becomes too much for him and he commits suicide by jumping from the window of his home after Nour visits him. A literal witch hunt ensues as bystanders immediately blame her and chase after her.
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Here Belktibia shows how just as witchcraft is alive and well in the modern day so are witch hunts. Whether you’re from Salem or in an under-resourced arrondissement in Paris, women’s stories aren’t believed, often at the cost of their lives. To make matters worse, Nour’s ex-husband Dylan (Jérémy Ferrari) uses this misunderstanding as an excuse to take custody of his son away from Nour.
While this is salient commentary, it is a moment where the narrative’s credibility is stretched to accommodate the contours of its themes. The lengths that these random strangers will go to avenge Kevin’s death, while it makes the idea of a witch hunt resonate, is baffling in context. Given how everyone in Nour’s arrondissement struggles to make a living, why would they go out of their way to aggressively beat and try to kill Nour? The conflict ultimately doesn’t work in the film’s modern-day setting. Additionally, the film’s central stakes after Kevin’s death revolve around Nour trying to reclaim her son from Dylan’s grasp. It is unintentionally hilarious in the way Nour steals her son from Dylan and vice versa and the core conflict does not move on beyond these moments of domestic strife.
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Thankfully, there are a few moments where Belktibia finds ways to mine thrills within this incredulity. That’s mainly thanks to a game Farahani who goes feral, as if to embody the animals she surrounds herself with. In one sequence, as Nour flees from the people chasing her, she unleashes a gargantuan lizard (to this reptile enthusiast, it looks like a monitor lizard) to distract her attackers. Her assailants stop just shy of reaching the top of the stairs and slowly back away in terror as they witness the reptile frolic menacingly. The camera shifts to the lizard’s point of view as it stares down the assailants, its hunger and drive matching that of Nour herself.
Hood Witch is frustrating in that its interesting themes are undone by the narrative housing them. Still, Farahani gives her all. The questions it explores, from the role of spiritual healing in the world of medicine to underscoring the importance of believing women’s stories, make me curious about the film that Belktibia tackles next, perhaps where he’s able to better flesh out his ideas. Plus, I hope there are more lizards.
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- 2/102/10
Summary
There are glimpses of exciting and salient commentary, but the film frustratingly circles the drain on a narrative that isn’t as interesting as the ideas it embodies.
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