Back in 2020, Sofia Alaoui was at Sundance with the short film What If the Goats Die, featuring animals acting strangely and some kind of eerie apocalypse. She left the festival with a jury prize and has now returned with a feature. The current project feels like an expansion of that short film, but maybe it is best to think of it as sharing some of the older project’s themes, weirdness, and worldview.
The new film, Animalia, is arthouse with elements of spirituality, sci-fi, and surrealism. It should maybe come with a warning: For Festivals Only, because in its handsome ambiguity it will certainly do the rounds at festivals. Outside that circuit, it should have an AAA label: Audiences Amenable to Ambiguity.
At the start, a series of tense moments and unfortunate events are visited on our protagonist, a pregnant lady named Itto (Oumaima Barid) living in opulence in Morocco. All is well at first before a wife and mother-in-law exchange, in the kitchen of their home, telegraphs an abrupt tenseness. It may be the usual friction between wife and mother-in-law, except that there seems to be more to the awkwardness.
Not long after, we understand the source of the tenseness: Itto doesn’t feel welcome because she comes from the lower class and believes her mother-in-law looks down on her for that reason. Her husband Amine (Mehdi Dehbi) waves off her concerns, and not long after departs alongside his mother for an event. Left alone in their stately home, Itto assumes a looseness we haven’t quite felt before. Even the soundtrack changes accordingly: the music is from the Isley Brothers. It is the only time the feature itself is loose. As you can imagine, it will not last forever.
Several of these scenes are filmed so beautifully by the film’s DP, Noe Bach, that the humans in them could be figures in a painting. Some of that intense beauty is lost as the film expands following Itto’s departure from home, caused by a couple of unfortunate events. Some impending danger seems to be getting close, Amine is stranded and can’t return, a neighbour paid to unite husband and wife in Khouribga turns out to be a fraud taking his own family away from the coming danger, which appears to be aliens that are never seen.
The route to unite wife with husband might make diverting, if thin, narrative fare but Alaoui, who is also the film’s screenwriter, has other ideas. To accommodate these ideas, there is a detour into an ambiguity that is frankly baffling. It’s all about the connectedness of things. Sure, things are connected – as we are told via voiceover – but how so in this case? What is the relationship between the crazed behaviour of the animals and the dazed manner of some of the humans Itto sees as she struggles to join her husband in Khouribga? No definitive answers are given to any of these questions, but it is clear that Alaoui is seeking to make a point about her country’s class and religious issues.
There is more clarity in the class discourse between wife and mother-in-law and in Itto’s negotiations with a man who decides to help, despite an initially uncordial contact. One of their exchanges reveals what seems to be a particular parsing of class through language in Morocco, an exchange that feels like it could take place anywhere. Details like this put Alaoui in a category of filmmakers that, in time, should become an important voice, especially for her country.
Animalia climbs into an even higher level of ambiguity towards its end and what the literal viewer can hold on to are the striking visuals and a small voice in one’s head saying, maybe this film requires a second viewing.
Director, Screenwriter : Sofia Alaoui
Cast: Mehdi Dehbi , Oumaïma Barid , Fouad Oughaou , Souad Khouyi
Producer: Margaux Lorier, Toufik Ayadi, Christophe Barral
Cinematography: Noe Bach
Editing: Héloïse Pelloquet
Music: Amine Bouhafa
Production companies: Totem
Venue: Sundance Film Festival (World Cinema Dramatic Competition)
In Arabic, French, Berber
91 minutes
