Bakma: A Tunisian nightmare of institutional violence, misogyny and urban abandonment

A woman’s dismembered body is discovered with a dog’s head sewn where her own should be. It is a typically blunt opening statement from Bakma, Abdelhamid Bouchnak’s fourth feature: a film with no interest in easing its audience into the brutality to come.

Premiered in Locarno’s out-of-competition sidebar, the 117-minute Tunisian thriller is lurid, abrasive and often grotesque. It is also more intriguing than its uneven execution initially suggests.

Police officers Ali and Khaled are assigned to investigate the ritualistic killing, whose perpetrator soon proves interested not only in murder but in staging a spectacle. His victims are drawn largely from the city’s margins, while dogs become both targets and symbols in his private war.

Khaled, played by Aziz Jebali, gradually emerges as the more developed of the two officers: damaged, volatile and struggling to keep his professional obsession from swallowing what remains of his family life. The killer, meanwhile, taunts the police through a menacing voiceover while constructing an increasingly elaborate mythology around his crimes.

The dog killings are not simply an imported horror device or a bid for easy provocation. Tunisian municipalities have long used shooting campaigns to reduce stray-dog populations, officially as a response to rabies and attacks on humans.

The policy remains current: authorities in Greater Tunis announced coordinated capture-and-shooting operations in late 2025, while the municipality of Kef launched another campaign in June 2026. Animal-welfare groups have pressed instead for vaccination and sterilisation, arguing that culling is both cruel and ineffective.

That reality gives Abdelhamid’s imagery a political charge, even when his screenplay cannot fully control it. Interestingly, the title refers to voicelessness, and the film aligns animals, unhoused people, sex workers and other social outcasts through their exposure to violence and their inability to shape the story told about them.

Its city is neither the photogenic Tunisia sold to tourists nor an exoticised vision of spectacular poverty. Chams Ghorab’s cinematography instead renders it as a recognisable urban environment hollowed out by night: dark streets, worn interiors and anonymous corners that become threatening without turning into a fantasy slum.

When the grotesque goes too far

Visually, Bakma is competent and occasionally striking. The low-key photography suits the genre, and the camera’s nocturnal movements build a sustained atmosphere of decay. Yet the approach is more functional than original, indebted to a familiar lineage of serial-killer procedurals.

More damagingly, the practical effects vary wildly in quality. Some wounds and mutilations carry the intended physical weight; others have a conspicuously plastic texture. A number of corpses and severed parts look manufactured enough to strain the viewer’s suspension of disbelief.

This inconsistency extends to the film’s tone. Abdelhamid embraces excess, but does not always distinguish between purposeful grotesquerie and mere overstatement. Scenes are held beyond the point at which their meaning is clear, as though the film does not trust either its images or its audience.

The violence itself is not necessarily the problem: this is, after all, a story about a merciless serial killer, and sanitising him would be dishonest. The weakness lies in how rarely the brutality acquires another dimension once its initial shock has landed.

The characters are similarly underworked. Khaled receives enough contradictions to suggest a life beyond the investigation, but much of the supporting cast remains sketched rather than developed. The performances are serviceable across the board, with no conspicuous failures but few memorable peaks.

At times, one senses that the actors are working in slightly different tonal registers, some leaning into pulp while others treat the material as unyielding social realism.

The killer’s psychology is the most serious limitation. His fury towards women and marginalised people could have become a study of punitive masculinity or of the way social disgust disguises itself as purification.

Instead, the explanation eventually leans too heavily on his relationship with a supposedly impure mother. That is too slight and schematic a foundation for such elaborate pathology.

Consequently, it remains unclear whether his contradictions are meant to expose a wider sickness or merely supply the film with lurid motivation. Ambiguity is not inherently a flaw, but here it often feels less like a deliberate refusal of answers than an idea insufficiently developed.

For most of its runtime, the investigation maintains reasonable momentum, though the film would benefit from a tighter edit. Its final revelation operates on the level of plot mechanics but is perhaps telegraphed too early to land the intended blow. A bolder structural decision might have matched the extremity of the imagery.

A filmmaker willing to take risks

Still, Abdelhamid’s willingness to take risks deserves recognition. Dachra explored horror, Golden Butterfly moved into drama and fantasy, and The Needle, screened in competition at the 2024 Torino Film Festival, confronted the pressures placed on parents after the birth of an intersex child.

In a Tunisian industry where resources are limited, and certain subjects carry genuine social sensitivity, this movement between genres is not negligible. He repeatedly chooses difficult material and refuses tasteful restraint.

That makes Bakma a logical selection for Locarno: it is precisely the kind of unruly genre piece whose audacity can generate a life beyond its premiere, particularly across horror and medium-sized international festivals. But daring subject matter is not the same as daring filmmaking.

Abdelhamid has found potent raw material in institutional violence, misogyny and urban abandonment; he has not yet shaped it into an equally rigorous work.

Had the film’s artistic choices matched its premise, Bakma might have been exceptional. As it stands, it is a flawed but arresting nightmare, more convincing as evidence of its helmer’s ambition than as a fully realised work.

Davide Abbatescianni is an Italian Film Critic and Journalist based in Rome

Follow him on X: @dabbatescianni