“The Prophet said: Satan circulates among men like blood in their veins. I therefore fear that he will sow evil in our hearts.” With this hadith at the forefront of Roqia, unveiled in the International Film Critics’ Week at the 82nd Venice Film Festival, Yanis Koussim clearly sets the very dark tone of his first feature film, which plunges us straight into a deep and chaotic darkness punctuated by screams (“they're coming”) in Algeria in the early 1990s. Borrowing from the codes of horror films and the paths of mystical parables, the filmmaker revisits this historical period of civil war, described by specialists as the “Black Decade”, linking it to our own era because, as we all know, evil is always lurking.

“What's going on?” The question recurs like a leitmotif (deliberately echoing in the mind of the viewer, who is plunged into a story constructed in an enigmatic manner) in conversations in a large Algerian city, currently experiencing a spate of savage and senseless murders. Shot in close-up shots following Slimane (Akram Djeghim), the disciple of an exorcist sheikh (Mostefa Djadjam) who turns out to have Alzheimer's, the plot plays on a tone of fear, doubt and paranoia ("What if they come back? – We'll do what we have to do") fuelled by disturbing chants from elsewhere, whispered in a foreign language.

Are the two protagonists (assisted by Waffa, a young woman played by Hanaa Mansour) charlatans? Fanatics? How much of their feverish, tense anxiety is fantasy, faith, and reality? To find out, we must go back to the beginning, as the plot shifts back to 1992 with the reappearance of Ahmed (Ali Namous), who mysteriously disappeared after a car accident, his face covered in bandages like a mummy and suffering from total amnesia, which his wife Selma (Lydia Hanni) and the police are trying to dispel. Who is he? Who was he? Why are his fingers cut off? What are these voices invading his head?

Playing with the classic ingredients of horror cinema (shadows, silhouettes, contamination, sacrifice, sudden and fleeting apparitions, possessed individuals with evil grins, exorcism sessions, the Koran read backwards, desecrators, blood, frightening and imperious chants that come out of nowhere, etc.), Roqia creates a dark atmosphere conducive to visual and auditory hallucinations. An atmosphere of mental and physical confusion is recreated with effective minimalism (probably also linked to a limited budget) to lift the veil, little by little, on the true subject of a film that aims to shed light on the vampires of fundamentalism (with its former jihadist combatants who passed through Afghanistan during the conflict against the Russians), which must be remembered at all costs to prevent their return.

Roqia was produced by French company Supernova Films and co-produced by Algerian company 19, Mulholland Drive. Alpha Violet handles international sales.