As the many offended reviews on here attest, you should make sure to keep away if you are after Hollywoodian action heroes, generic slasher thrills or spectacular supernatural horror; I kinda sympathise with teenagers approaching a movie dubbed by marketeers as 'horror,' with clear expectation, that can only be disappointed. If you're looking for stylish zombie killing with a Senegalese twist, try Herbulot's Saloum instead. If, on the other hand, your attention-span has not yet shrunk to standard size, and you can cope with a slow build and appreciate an acutely observed portrait, for what it says, rather than what it does, this might be worth your time!
The writing is good: subdued and self-aware, playing with our expectations of 'minority horror', avoiding obvious tropes and hinting at some disquieting of class, race and gender (though I feel the odium might have been spread more evenly between Amy and Adam). The acting is very good (Anna Diop is subtle and shows a great range, Rose Decker is convincing throughout. Again only Amy felt a little too monolithic); The cinematography is sharp and expressive, with the 'water' theme an occasion for a few interesting visual experiments (i.e. The bathtub scenes) and a few that fall short (i.e. The damp bed scenes). The production is a little over-polished for my taste (did Malik the concierge need to drive a convertible?) and on occasion a bit easy (are date scenes awash in multi-coloured neon lights mandatory those days?) But on the whole this is balanced, subtle and elegant: the contrast between Aisha's flat and that of Amy is spot on; the 'modernised' Dutch-wax dresses immediately build characters; etc. The sound effects are good, but the music is a mixed-bag: I'd have gone with less trap and more kora (which has great creepy potential).
Where the film really shines is in its subtle and iconoclastic portrayal Black characters (i.e. The girl at the Western Union counter, the weird fellow nannies on the playground or
Aisha herself is refreshingly nuanced, neither loud nor supine but self-assured, articulate and unflinching. She's not the most likeable character on earth (the core relation to her son is on screen only through photographs) but she brings a healthy dose of social realism in a genre always at risk of constructing its own clichés. Aside from those vignettes, the fantastic element which connects them is a little extraneous and disappointing. It feels a little 'tacked on' and this nudges the whole thing toward magical realism rather than horror or fantastic. I also think 'Trickster' figures simply don't fit the feature film format all that well: they lack the time to display the various aspects of their ambiguous character, and end up merely confused and confusing. That is what happens here. The vague New Age womanist references also don't help clarifying the lore out.
In short, there's room for improvement, a stricter production and a tighter scenario would have pleased many more. But all the same, this is an impressive first feature-length entry from Nikyatu Jusu, whom I'll make sure to follow in the future.
