‘Silent Storms’: Marrakech Review

Dir. Dania Reymond-Boughenou. Belgium/France. 2024. 85 mins

Viewers may not quite know where they are once the dust has cleared in Silent Storms, which follows a journalist tracking mysterious sandstorms around Algiers. This dense, sometimes confusing debut from French-Algerian writer-director Dania Reymond-Boughenou is an ambitious, accomplished and serious-minded attempt to address grief, political reconciliation and the legacy of conflict in a way that fuses the real and the fantastic, the languages of political thriller, ghost story and eco-disaster spectacle – all on a tightly controlled art-cinema scale.

The narrative coherence is sometimes as murky as the city’s skies

Tautly acted, this Marrakech competition title should create modest commercial ripples – boosted by the commercial profile of actor and singing star Camélia Jordana – but will certainly bring auteur cachet to its up-and-coming director. 

With dialogue in Arabic and French, the film is set today in what opening captions tell us is a city on the shores of an unknown sea – but the locale is evidently Algeria, and the allusions are to the turbulence of that country’s civil war of the 1990s. Its protagonist, initially at least, is Nacer (Khaled Benaissa), a middle-aged newspaper journalist who has long mourned his wife Fajar (Jordana), shot dead by militia. He is first seen quizzing a former militant, ostensibly for research, but it quickly emerges that he has more personal motivations. Later, though, Nacer drops in at his beleaguered newspaper and tries to interest the editor in the case of a strange yellow dust that is blowing into the vicinity. 

That is not the only puzzling phenomenon brewing: there are reported sightings of the dead returning to life. And eventually, who should turn up in a cab but Fajar herself, supposedly back from a trip to Canada and puzzled by Nacer’s anxious reaction. This is one of those rare films in which Lazarus-like resurrection is expressly placed in an incongruous context of everyday normality – as in Robin Campillo’s 2004 debut They Came Back – and before long, Fajar has embarked on a new career as an estate agent.

Meanwhile, Nacer’s doctor brother Yacine (Mehdi Ramdani), traumatised by the death of a patient, makes a connection with a young woman, Sharazade (Shirine Boutella), who takes him for a cathartic night out at a subterranean artists’ hangout – vivid, but otherwise something of a distracting digression. During all this, strange clouds roll in, presaging a spectacularly staged climax in which this moody, fantastically-tinged piece of urban realism goes full-scale apocalyptic.

There are obvious problems with Silent Storms (not to be confused with 2014 UK drama The Silent Storm; the original French title means simply ‘The Storms’). One is that it so dramatically ends up not as it initially seems, without the appropriate narrative build-up doesn’t to guide us. And there are too many strands, subsidiary characters, enigmatic asides (including strange poetic monologues) and changes of focus (at different times, we follow all four main characters, sometimes with their own voice-overs).

The narrative coherence is sometimes as murky as the city’s skies. Yet Reymond-Boughenou and her co-writers and editors deserve applause for squeezing this complex mass of incident into a consistently gripping 85 minutes – and the concluding sandstorm is handled with a flourish as poetic as it is spectacular. (While this Belgian-French production is very much an Algerian drama, it also resonates with a current French trend for the apocalyptic, in films as varied as Acid, Vincent Must Die and Salem.)           

A strong cast provides connecting threads through the literal and metaphoric murkiness, notably a saturnine, downbeat Benaissa, with Jordana, best known on screen for Emmanuel Mouret’s 2020 Love Affair(s),  a compellingly enigmatic presence although we never quite get to know her Fajar as a living person – which may, of course, be the point. DoP Augustin Barbaroux (recent Venice title And Their Children After Them) also makes a virtuoso effort, especially in the chiaroscuro night sequences and in the dense yellow atmospherics of the final act.