Red Path review — a severed head, football and an awkward romance
There's a lot going on in this grim Tunisian drama and I'm not sure that all of it works. It was inspired by a horrifying real-life incident from 2015 when Islamic State psychopaths beheaded a teenage shepherd on a remote part of Mount Mghila and then forced his cousin to carry the severed head back to his village as a gruesome warning sign.
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In the powerful opening scenes here, the shepherd Nizar (Yassine Samouni) and his cousin Achraf (Ali Helali) are pictured traversing the Tunisian landscape, climbing Mount Mghila and savouring the soulful beauty around them. 'Millions of years ago this place belonged to the fish,' Nizar says after cooling off in a mountain pool. The director, Lotfi Achour, then cuts to dramatic widescreen shots of undulating sedimentary rock, as if to provide comment on geological time and human impermanence. At this point Isis attack, Achraf is beaten unconscious and Nizar is beheaded off-camera. Then follows a mighty jump-scare, when Achraf awakes to see his decapitated cousin on the ground bedside him.
And after that it gets strange. Achraf carries the head around in a sports bag, initially unable to reveal the truth to Nizar's loving family. He plays football with the locals, hiding the head in a tree, and it begins to feel like the Raymond Carver short story So Much Water So Close to Home, in which the friends go fishing despite discovering a dead body.
There is an awkward romantic element too, as Achraf inconceivably starts crushing on Nizar's former girlfriend. Once Achraf comes clean and delivers the head, there's a wildly absurd scene in which Nizar's father has to remove a shelf from the family freezer to fit his son's skull inside. And then Nizar's ghost appears to Achraf to partake in vaguely philosophical conversations. None of this quite coheres as a single storytelling vision, however — all that remains is the horror.★★☆☆☆
15, 101min
In cinemas from Jun 20
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