Algeria's Black Decade reimagined as horror in Yanis Koussim's Roqia

Algerian filmmaker Yanis Koussim’s debut feature, Roqia, arrives at Venice’s International Film Critics’ Week like a wound reopened.

At once intimate and epic, the film confronts the spectres of Algeria’s 'Black Decade' (1992–2002), when extremist violence engulfed the country and left traumas still felt today.

Rather than treat this history as sober drama, Koussim frames it through the prism of horror, where memory loss, possession, and blood rituals echo a society struggling to confront its past.

The result is a work that refuses to look away, insisting that only by naming and showing violence can healing begin.

A story in fragments

Roqia, Arabic for "exorcism," unfolds across three interwoven parts, spanning the 1990s and the present day.

The first chapter introduces us to an ageing Muslim exorcist, or raqi, who performs rituals on possessed women. His authority, however, is undercut by Alzheimer’s: he forgets prayers, mixes words, and terrifies his disciple, who fears that his master’s decline might unleash forces long suppressed.

“You can feel the evil inside you, but you remember nothing,” whispers a woman undergoing an exorcism, capturing the film’s central motif of memory distorted by violence.

The second strand flashes back to 1992, where Ahmed, a man wrapped in bandages after a car accident, returns to his village with total amnesia. Neither his wife nor his children feels familiar, and his youngest recoils from him in fear.

At night, strange figures gather around his bed, chanting litanies in an unknown tongue. His neighbour, ostensibly a friend, radiates menace.

As Algeria descends into bloodshed, Ahmed’s erasure of identity mirrors the way ordinary men vanished into the ranks of terrorists, leaving loved ones bewildered at how familiar faces became executioners.

The final chapter follows Waffa, a pregnant woman navigating a present scarred by fundamentalist violence. For her, survival depends on resisting a distorted reading of Islam weaponised by extremists.

Koussim makes clear: terrorism is not Islam, but an appropriation of its texts, twisted to justify atrocities. Together, these three narratives form a tapestry of past and present, personal and political, bound by a terror that refuses to be fully exorcised.

Horror as a necessary language

Koussim is explicit about why he chose horror: “The genre imposed itself on me. It was the only way my imagination could attempt to make sense of such violence,” he explained. 

Growing up in Sétif in the 1980s and 1990s, he recalls both the normality of beach trips and family gatherings and the horrors that intruded on daily life.

A great-uncle was kidnapped and raped at 70; another uncle was shot dead. Friends walked to school past severed heads left on the pavement. The oscillation between ordinary childhood and unthinkable brutality demanded a cinematic form that could embrace the uncanny.

Horror, with its capacity to turn neighbours into monsters and familiar homes into claustrophobic traps, became the only adequate grammar.

Indeed, Roqia sidesteps conventional horror imagery. There are no levitating bodies, spinning heads, or goat-hooved demons.

Instead, evil manifests in whispers, in blood that carries corruption rather than life, in faceless men who could be anyone. The true monsters are terrorists, often unseen but ever-present, infiltrating the fabric of society like a contagion.

By grounding the supernatural in rigorous realism, Koussim refuses the comfort of metaphor: the horror is real, its perpetrators human, its consequences ongoing.

Memory, amnesia, and the return of violence

Central to Roqia is the tension between remembering and forgetting. Ahmed’s amnesia and the exorcist’s Alzheimer’s serve as metaphors for a society caught between erasing trauma and confronting it. In both timelines, forgetting proves perilous.

“When you try to erase a memory, evil comes back,” Koussim notes. This diagnosis resonates beyond Algeria, suggesting that unacknowledged violence — be it colonial massacres, slavery, Nazism, or more recent wars — mutates and resurfaces if left unexamined.

The film’s structure reinforces this — the past and present bleed into one another, with images of blood as the connective tissue. Once a symbol of kinship, here blood becomes the conduit of evil, passed from one body to another.

Koussim films violence head-on, refusing stylisation. Gunshots, massacres, and executions appear with brutal clarity. For him, only truth — however unbearable — can offer the possibility of peace. It is a radical commitment to representation: the camera must not look away.

An Algerian tragedy with universal echoes

While deeply rooted in Algeria’s civil war, Roqia speaks to global experiences of terror. The country, Koussim argues, was a “laboratory of terrorism,” experiencing in the 1990s the violence that would later spread across the world with al-Qaeda and Daesh (the Islamic State group).

His film thus resonates with audiences far beyond North Africa, not only as testimony but as a warning: evil returns to the same places, to the same wounds, unless confronted.

At the same time, Roqia insists on distinguishing between Islam and its distortion. Having grown up in an Islamic household and witnessed his grandmother’s devotion, Koussim is adamant: “Islam does not tell you to put babies in the oven, slaughter people and rape pregnant women.”

By depicting the zawiya (religious school) transformed into a site of exorcism and terror, the film underscores how sacred spaces can be perverted. The message is urgent: violent fundamentalism is not Islam, but its betrayal.

The rise of Arab horror

Roqia also enters into a broader wave of Arabic horror cinema, from Egyptian hits like The Blue Elephant to series such as Paranormal.

Koussim sees this resurgence as both cultural and practical. Arab societies are rich with mythologies of jinns and spirits rarely explored on screen, while advances in digital effects make horror more affordable.

“We know the mythology of the Greeks and the Christians, but not ours,” he observes. By reclaiming this imaginative terrain, filmmakers can both honour their traditions and address contemporary fears.

For Koussim, the genre is also deeply personal. His first cinematic memory was seeing Jaws at six years old. Horror, fantasy, and thrillers are, in his view, the gateways to cinema for most children. By embracing horror, he not only processes Algeria’s traumas but reconnects with his own earliest cinematic awe.

A claustrophobic realism

Formally, Roqia is marked by its claustrophobic interiors and dimly lit spaces. Much of the action unfolds in rooms where characters whisper, hide, or pray, their fear pressing against the walls.

Koussim admits he realised only in editing how interior the film had become.

Yet this suffocation mirrors the intimacy of trauma, the secrecy of violence endured behind closed doors. It is not spectacle but proximity that unsettles: we breathe with these characters, feel their dread seep into the fabric of everyday life.

Exorcising the unhealed wound

Ultimately, Roqia is less an attempt to resolve Algeria’s trauma than to expose it.

The title evokes ritual purification, but the film offers no easy deliverance. Instead, it stages the persistence of violence, the impossibility of forgetting, and the necessity of facing evil directly. In doing so, Koussim offers both Algerians and global audiences a mirror: to deny the past is to risk repeating it.

In one of the film’s most chilling lines, a character pleads, “I’d rather die than be possessed again.” The possession here is not just demonic but historical — the haunting of an entire society by atrocities unexorcised.

By daring to merge horror and history, Koussim makes visible what many would prefer to leave unspoken.

Roqia is not just a film about evil: it is a cinematic exorcism of Algeria’s haunted past, one whose resonance will linger long after the credits fade.

Agnese Albertini is a film journalist and critic for Best Movie, both its online magazine and Italy’s most widely read monthly print publication on cinema and entertainment, as well as cinefilos.it and cinemaserietv.it. Based between Italy and Dubai, she regularly covers major international film festivals, including Cannes, Venice, and Biografilm, with a focus on reviews, features, and cultural reporting

Follow her on Instagram: @agnesealbertini