Fantastic Fest Review: The Vile

The cuckoo in the nest is a common theme in thrillers and horror. The idea of the smiling usurper, especially one who flaunts their youth and sexuality against an older protagonist, is deeply disturbing because it means their victim is fighting not one but two adversaries: not just the person trying to force them out, but their own age.

In Emirati supernatural chiller The Vile, age is already the silent enemy of Amani (Bdoor Mohammed), one she is determined to ignore. She’s a middle-aged, middle-class woman with a comfortable marriage, but the way she subtly infantilizes her teen daughter, Noor (Iman Tarik), playing games of hide-and-seek in their home and bickering about phones, seems centered around keeping herself feeling youthful. That delusion is blown apart the day that her husband, Khalid (Jasem Alkharraz), brings home his new second wife, Zahra (Sarah Taibah) – younger, prettier, and pregnant with the baby boy that Amani promised Khalid.

The ensuing, more traditional horror elements of The Vile are there to complement the emotional jump scare of that moment, as the life that Amani had is ended. It’s a murder of sorts, only the victim is still there to experience the wake. Mohammed – an accomplished stage actress in her first screen performance – pours all the rage and despair of rejected women into Amani, her agony amplified by her husband’s obliviousness and belief that he’s done nothing wrong. Polygamy is legal in the United Arab Emirates, he argues, and Zahra will just be someone else to help around the house.

Yet it’s certain that the home was already withering. Writer/director Majid Al Ansari (Zinzana) leaves hints and clues that Khalid is halfway out the door, always working, and it’s unclear if this second wedding was from love, practicality, or just because he got his mistress pregnant. At the same time, Amani has become disengaged: The household is in a measure of disarray, the sink constantly filled with dishes, and Amani only becomes protectively houseproud when Zahra starts offering to help.

What makes The Vile successful as a supernatural horror is that it doesn’t need the black magic subplot to make the audience care about the characters – especially Amani and Noor. It’s an extraordinarily well-crafted and mournful tale of a family in collapse, and of a woman who knows how limited her options are. When the first wisps of black magic curl around the edges of the story, they don’t really tell us anything we don’t already know, and they don’t change who Amani is. She doesn’t undergo some Final Girl transformation, even if the details of Zahra’s smiling home invasion might suggest a more overblown response, and that’s all to the credit of Mohammed. She makes Amani a pen pal to Mama Lena in A Raisin in the Son or Nora in A Doll’s House, a strong woman fractured by the idiocy of men. When she silently melts down on Noor after Zahra first crosses the threshold, it’s a moment of female agony that is profound and heartbreaking.

Al Ansari’s greatest achievement as a director is in not letting these elements of the drama be subsumed by or become secondary to the undeniable rising mist of the uncanny that starts to pervade the not-so-happy home. While Mohammed portrays Amani as a woman on the edge of a breakdown, trying to find a way to hold on to something like her life, Taibah gives Zahra a warm veneer over a steely layer, and it’s the slow reveal of what’s under there that takes The Vile into its darkest reaches. But as deep into Hell as it goes, it never loses sight of Amani, scrabbling towards the light.

World Premiere

2025, NR, 95 min. Directed by Majid Al Ansari. Starring Bdoor Mohammed, Sarah Taibah, Jasem Alkharraz.

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