KANDISHA (2020 - French)

Studio:      Shudder
Director:    Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Writer:      Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo
Producer:  Wassim Beji, Delphine Clot, Guillaume Lemans
Stars:     Mathilde La Musse, Suzy Bemba, Samarcande Saadi, Meriem Sarolie, Sandor Funtek, Walid Afkir, Felix Glaux-Delporto

Review Score:

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Summary:

Three best friends inadvertently invoke a vengeful demon who threatens to violently kill their male friends and family.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Best friends Amelie, Bintou, and Morjana meet at an abandoned building to spray paint a graffiti mural dedicated to Morjana’s deceased parents. The girls find the word “Kandisha” hidden on one of the walls. Morjana recounts the Moroccan legend of Aicha Kandisha, the vengeful ghost of a beautiful woman who can be summoned with a pentagram to murder men.

On her walk home, Amelie’s drunken ex-boyfriend Farid violently assaults Amelie on the street. Amelie and Farid physically wound each other, but Amelie eventually fights her way free.

Distraught over the attack, Amelie uses blood from her wounds to draw a star on her shower wall back home. Amelie recites Kandisha’s name several times. Elsewhere, Kandisha appears behind Farid. Frightened, Farid runs into the street where he is struck and killed by a passing car.

After discussing Farid’s peculiar death, the three girls meet with their other friends for an outdoor party the next night. Amelie becomes entranced when she hears Kandisha’s voice coming from a fire. Amelie’s friend Ben comes to check on her and is suddenly immolated by the flames.

Amelie tells Bintou and Morjana about the summoning she performed. The girls look further into Kandisha’s legend, but still aren’t sure what to believe regarding the unusual deaths. However, Amelie and her little brother Antoine briefly encounter Kandisha in their apartment building hallway when they go home later that night.

Kandisha supernaturally attacks another male friend, Ako, and throws him through his kitchen window. Amelie tells Bintou and Morjana that she witnessed the murders through Kandisha’s eyes as if she was there.

Worried about the other men in their lives, the girls warn Morjana’s brother Abdel and their friend Erwan, but they don’t take the ghost story seriously. After doing a cursory search online, Erwan still suggests performing the summoning ritual backwards in order to banish the evil spirit.

Amelie, Bintou, and Morjana gather in Amelie’s bathroom. Amelie uses her menstrual blood to draw another pentagram in the bathtub. She then kills her little brother’s pet rabbit over the star as a sacrifice. After filling the tub and reciting her name again, Amelie sees Kandisha’s reflection in the water.

Erwan goes to the hospital to see his girlfriend Aminata’s newborn baby. Kandisha supernaturally slaughters Erwan in the maternity ward.

The three girls seek help from Muslim imam Ahmed Ibn Fahlan and his son, who is also a rector. The girls learn that Kandisha was a martyred soul who bonded with a jinn to perpetuate violence beyond death by demanding the lives of six men once invoked. Ahmed identifies two ways to banish the demon, one of which is an exorcism, but he refuses to reveal the other method.

Ahmed, his son, Amelie, Bintou, and Morjana join hands while seated in a circle representing the Seal of Solomon. Ahmed recites an exorcism rite. Kandisha rises from the center as the girls experience various supernatural visions, but the ceremony ultimately comes to what they assume is a successful conclusion.

Kandisha later crushes Abdel to death under her hooves in the sauna at his gym. The girls return to tell the imam that the exorcism didn’t work, but the rector informs them that his father died from the stress of the ritual. Amelie asks what the second method is to banish Kandisha. The rector confesses that the original summoner must sacrifice her own life and be reincarnated as the vengeful spirit.

Amelie considers jumping off of a roof, but Bintou and Morjana stop her. Realizing that Bintou’s father may be the next victim, the three friends rush to Bintou’s house where they witness the mutated demon ripping Bintou’s father in half.

Fearing Amelie’s little brother Antoine will die next, the three girls bring him to the abandoned building where they meet with the rector to prepare for a confrontation with Kandisha. Kandisha appears and attacks everyone in the group. However, before Kandisha can choke Antoine to death, Amelie jumps down an elevator shaft. Amelie’s suicide causes Kandisha to vanish.

Antoine, Bintou, Morjana, and the rector later gather to watch the abandoned building’s demolition. That night, Antoine uses his blood to draw a star on his bathroom mirror while reciting Kandisha’s name. The demon appears with Amelie’s face.

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Review:

Call it a curse, bad luck, or possibly poor business deals, but French filmmaking duo Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo seem to get the shaft every time they make a movie. 2007’s “Inside” (review here) thrust them into the splatter spotlight. Their 2011 follow-up “Livide” (review here) could have kept them there, except Dimension still sits on it over a decade later as the film has yet to see an official North American release. A similar fate almost befell “Among the Living” (review here), which played at SXSW in 2014, but other audiences didn’t see until it showed up on Shudder three years later. Also in 2017, “Leatherface” (review here) appeared poised to be their big English-language break, but “Texas Chainsaw Massacre” stakeholders looked at the lukewarm response and decided to take the franchise in a different direction (again) by ignoring their installment altogether. And we’re only talking about made movies here, not false starts like “Halloween II” or a “Hellraiser” reboot, both of which had Maury and Bustillo attached at one point yet never came to fruition.

For their sakes, I’m glad to see the two of them tiring of Hollywood’s runaround and returning to their indie horror roots with “Kandisha,” a simple supernatural slasher loosely based on an under-the-radar Moroccan legend. The movie is only mildly frightening, and moderately flawed. At least Maury and Bustillo are back to basics with their signature style of cinematic slaughter, and not going on goose chases to appease unappreciative moneymen who prefer putting their projects on shelves instead of putting them out to the public.

Something I cited with “Among the Living” was that script’s usage of problematic language and behavior to connect its young protagonists with camaraderie. “Among the Living” meant to be an Amblin adventure with a “Friday the 13th” feel, but its characters came off as “deviant dickheads” because they peed on each other for condescending cackles, used “f*ggot” as an insult, and plotted to burn down an old farmer’s barn just because they didn’t like him. Believe me, I’m not an oversensitive pearl-clutcher about things like this. I simply see a conflict of intention versus actuality when people I’m supposed to root for act like obnoxious a-holes.

With Maury and Bustillo up to old tricks, this becomes a problem that plagues “Kandisha” too. The circle of friends surrounding main trio Amelie, Bintou, and Morjana is older, likely late teens or early twenties. Yet they’re almost as immature as “Among the Living’s” grade-school kids. Nicknames are based on race, with one person dubbed “Arab” and another called “Blackie.” “Blackie” bears the additional brunt of a wisecrack about Black people having AIDS. Someone also jokes about the demon named Kandisha by suggesting they summon a cleaning lady ghost named Conchita to “clean up their sh*t.”

Like “Among the Living,” maybe an argument can be made that this is how friends of that age actually talk. But when it comes to making fictional folks endearing instead of unappealing, there’s an uncomfortable line between playful teasing and race-based bullying that “Kandisha” crosses, which is unfortunate to see since the cast is so diverse. If not for their crudeness, the vast variation of religions, ethnicities, and social statuses could be an exemplary melting pot of characters.

The issue could also be a cultural difference between what counts as acceptable insult comedy in one country versus another. In post-2020 America though, it’s difficult to not hear a distracting siren in your head as soon as someone speaks a slur, even when it’s in jest between buddies.

Bad balancing acts don’t stop there. “Kandisha” also encounters some difficulty differentiating between essential exposition and banal background that doesn’t need to be bothered with. The film’s first act spends an inordinate amount of time setting up each girl’s personal life, including what’s going on in their respective homes. Then the movie keeps going until we also learn more than we need to about every one of their friends, a lot of which isn’t flattering.

I can appreciate when a horror film takes time for trivialities to some degree so I’m not sitting there wondering why we should care about someone we know nothing about. But I don’t understand why “Kandisha’s” camera would linger on ancillary characters giving each other guff when such a scene adds nothing notable to the main woman we’re supposed to be focused on. I guess it’s nice to know Morjana has a job as a nurse at a hospital, or that her brother is obsessed with the gym. But do those things have something significant to say about those people, or are they only excuses to establish locations where later moments take place?

“Kandisha” doesn’t have a hint of horror until the 16-minute mark, when the leading ladies finally stumble upon the myth of a woman who bonded with a demon to get revenge on the men who martyred her. A certain circumstance inspires one of them to test the truth, and her half-inadvertent invocation unleashes the titular terror to tear apart the males in their lives whether they deserve it or not.

That becomes another peculiar problem. Men soon start dying and we don’t know why. Considering how much time we spend with most of these males in that first scene of vaguely hateful kvetching at a café, you’d think “Kandisha” would suggest some reason why they’d be targets for supernatural assassination. A shared secret hidden in their past? A collective conspiracy to be revealed down the line? Other than the first victim, no explanation ever comes for why these men are murdered.

SPOILERS

This creates another conundrum regarding the movie’s mythology. Because there’s often a number involved with these kinds of curses, we eventually learn that once she is summoned, Kandisha will take the lives of six men. I’m not sure if I forgot how to do math correctly or if the film did, but Kandisha does kill six men, seven if you also include the Muslim imam who fails an exorcism. So unless something was lost in subtitle translation or I completely missed it, why does everyone worry about Amelie’s brother and the imam’s son being murdered when Kandisha has more than fulfilled her quota?

END SPOILERS

Even with occasionally off-putting heroines and bald spots in its story, “Kandisha” earns a routine score because it’s a routine spook show. One thing about Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo is they rarely hit hurdles on the technical end of their craft. “Kandisha” slows through a few predictable stretches, but it always looks slick, boasting a few good gruesome bits to even out lame lightning flashes and other basic boos that are part and parcel with potboiler paranormal activity.

Had Blumhouse produced the project, and had it starred a few TV-famous faces from The CW, “Kandisha” would have made a respectable amount of money over two or three theatrical weekends. It’s standard slumber party stuff chock full of angsty young friends, a Ouija-adjacent summoning, a vengeful spirit, you know the drill. But these are the streamlined shockers Maury and Bustillo got good at making. Big studios churning out mainstream chillers would be head over heels in love with them by now if the blinds hadn’t been closed on nearly all of their previous efforts.

Review Score: 60

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