Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation

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Fiona M Two hours of my life I’ll never get back. Grim. Did I mention grim? Poor conclusion. Little explanation. What was the point? Rated 2/5 Stars •  Rated 2 out of 5 stars 07/13/24 Full Review Alan W Lured by an intriguing premise of a pair of cops investigating a puzzling and horrifying series of immolations taking place in a new district in Tunis, Youssef Chebbi's film, co-written with Francois-Michel Allegrini, looks like an Arabic remake of a prestigious HBO detective procedurals like True Detective. With plenty of long moody shots of characters staring into mid-air against an urban landscape inhabited by tower cranes and empty half-finished buildings, the film often mistakes slow and withholding for atmospheric and enigmatic, as the story plods sedately onwards, while subplots and secondary characters seem to get lost, or lost in translation, in an unfocused and unhurried screenplay. One involving a Commission headed by the father of one of the cops to look into historical police abuse and corruption seems to go nowhere while some of the cliches found here would've been much less forgivable had this been in English. Fatma Oussaifi's female cop is restless, modern and independent, mainly because she has regular sexual liaisons with the pizza delivery guy, while Mohamed Grayaa is her typically more experienced and pragmatic partner who's a family man with a young daughter and a pregnant wife, yet his change in motivation and behaviour in the second half is left mostly unexplained or justified. It's conceivable that this would make more sense to someone more familiar with the associated socio-political context in Tunisia, but despite a few notes at the start of the film, it's not made entirely clear here, and so remains impenetrable to a less informed Western audience. Instead, my heart sank when anything resembling an effort towards an explanation vanishes with an unwelcoming third-act genre switch that avoids explaining the inexplicable, and inevitably raises suspicions as to whether this is less a cop story but more a frustrating narrative cop-out. Rated 1.5/5 Stars •  Rated 1.5 out of 5 stars 03/10/24 Full Review TRICYCLE C Such a profound film - An auteur in the making, I cannot wait for the next film from this filmmaker. Uses genre to express the malaise of an entire nation. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 08/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Ashkal: The Tunisian Investigation

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