‘Hounds’: Cannes Review

Dir/scr: Kamal Lazraq. Morocco/France/Belgium/Qatar/Saudi Arabia. 2023. 94 mins.

A gritty thriller set over one Casablanca day and night, Kamal Lazraq’s impressive debut takes us on a tense journey through the underbelly of Morocco’s largest city where a father and son walk a knife edge between life and death, right and wrong, reality and a spirit netherworld. There’s barely a second of slack in a film whose power comes at least in part from the natural performances by non-professional actors Ayoub Elaid as the son and Abdellatif Masstouri – who was apparently running a grilled sardine stall when the director approached him – as his wayward father.

This is a world in which every favour incurs a debt

Though comparisons will be made to films as diverse as Fargo, Mean Streets and the ‘Marvin’ episode of Pulp Fiction, Hounds is by no means derivative. Opening with a snarling attack dog and taking in the grisly dismemberment of a corpse (heard but not seen, which only makes it more vivid), Lazraq’s first feature is certainly hard-boiled, but also steeped in the culture it portrays. This is a world in which every favour incurs a debt, and for the little guys at the bottom of the pile, the debts form a chain that stretches off into infinity. This strong local flavour, DoP Amine Berrada’s shallow-focus, available-light camerawork and Lazraq’s command of mood, especially in the night sequences with their systolic alternation of panic and eerie calm, may tempt a few arthouse distributors with a taste for edgy world cinema.

Hassan (Masstouri) and Issam (Elaid) make for a mismatched (but for that very reason believable) father and son pair, the former a tough, wiry, mop-haired chancer who looks like he’s been around the block a few times, the latter an intense, introspective lad who, if he weren’t a small pawn in the Casablanca underworld, could easily pass for a devout madrasa student. He’s more grounded than his dad, more bothered about crossing moral lines, but such are the laws of filial obedience in Morocco that when Hassan asks for his help in carrying out a small job, Issam can’t refuse.

Commissioned by Dib (Abdellah Lebkiri), a local crime lord, enraged by what he sees as the cheating arrogance of a rival boss during an illegal dogfight, the ‘job’ results in the accidental killing of one of the rival’s henchmen, and all hell lets loose. Bodies may simply disappear in the classic Hollywood crime caper, but here in urban Morocco, where everyone lives on top of each other, they are not so easily brushed under the carpet – especially not this extra-large one. It’s a weight, in every sense, and the problem of its disposal in a world in which – paradoxically – the living are more disposable than the dead, dominates the rest of the film.

During the dark night of the soul that follows, the balance of power and authority between father and son shifts, though the price Issam pays for taking control will be, if all goes well, a life of indentured mob servitude. Perhaps this is what Allah has decreed for him, or perhaps there are even older beliefs at work here: when a donkey bars the road as Hassan and Issam look for a place to dig a grave, the father wonders if it might be a djinn. Hounds’ intertwining of religion, personal ethics, power games and the endless cycle of nature is neatly summed up in a basket of figs that briefly accompanies the two reluctant undertakers. From a miraculously abundant tree that was planted over the grave of an earlier mob victim, they save father and son when a traffic policeman who has stopped the duo is more interested in stealing the figs than checking to see what’s in the boot of the car. The circle of life and death may be warped and buckled in Hounds, but nobody can stop it turning.