A sense of the uncanny makes Morocco uneasy

Daniel Nelson

You sense from the opulence of the Moroccan home in the opening scenes of Animalia that the director is setting us up for a fall.

All this languid wealth suggests there will be a price to pay.

But when the switch comes from the well-connected family who are about to sign a deal bringing even more wealth, the tone is unexpected.

Pregnant Itto, who has married upwards into the family, is happy to find herself luxuriatingly alone when the family go hob-nobbing with other members of the elite. Her indulgent relaxation is shattered by the sudden sight and dust of soldiers on the move and then by increasingly urgent phone calls from her husband.

Without explaining why, he says she must leave quickly, and that he has arranged for a servant to take her to another, safer, town.

That’s when things start to go wrong, and the film shifts gear, into weirdness and the paranormal.

Dogs behave strangely. So do birds (to the point where I thought we were going to get a Moroccan-flavoured Alfred Hitchcock replay) and a stranger who appears from nowhere to declare, “My animals are possessed by the devil”.

A sense of the uncanny takes over.

Itto is on the run, in the back of an open mini--truck driven across vast, open landscape by a man — a fellow Berber — she has paid to take her back to her husband. A brief exchange reinforces the religious element in the strange goings-on that occur around them. “If your god existed he’d help the poor. But he helps you. It’s like adding water to the sea,” he says. Itto,  more devout, replies: “Injustice is a test.”

Dense fogs, a freakish but beautiful meteorological event; bewildered people heading for safety, a few with beatific expressions and a repeated phrase, “I will be alright”; swooping birds during prayers in a mosque. There are elements of science fiction, but more particularly of a readjustment of our and other consciousnesses, of mysticism, a hint of the equality of peoples. It’s not a sermon, it’s a fever dream, hints and allusions. The key observation in the film is perhaps that “the physical world is based on a more complex one. Like fish who do not see the water they are in, we’re immersed in something we don’t see either.” The phenomena we glimpse in the film suggests that complexity.

Some will find director Sofia Alaoui’s vision too elusive, insufficiently explicit, but it’s the restraint, and the interplay with a Muslim society, that makes it so absorbing.