I have seen thousands of horror films, but I do not recall a single one which begins, in quite a matter-of-fact-way, with the decapitation of a child (not explicitly shown, fortunately). That really got my attention.
A group of three film students visit a mental hospital in order to film a patient who is considered a witch, and based on a clue she provides seek out a remote hamlet. Once there, they find it to be inhabited by very strange residents and end up facing a horror far beyond anything they imagined...
It turns out that DACHRA, evidently Tunisia's first horror film, is very good at amplifying horror by presenting it in a mundane way, yet at the same time it oozes with atmosphere. Judging by the scarcity of horror movies which are successful in their attempts to do that, this is a credit to the film.
Also, I loved the feistiness of the female leader of the group during the interview with the hospital director. Unfortunately, by the end of the movie, her character has undergone an arc for the worse. In fact, the development of the characters and the poor choices they make are the weakest aspects of the movie. They fail to provide critical information to each other, they seem unreasonably unconcerned with the increasingly unsettling events they witness until there is no room left for ambiguity, and shortly before the end there is a twist which seems too implausible because it was not set up properly (for example, the twist contradicts the seeming surprise of one of the characters when he discovers they have been filmed while sleeping).
These flaws do not completely mitigate the strengths of the movie, they just reduce what could have been a great horror film to merely a good one. On a final note, DACHRA feels strongly like a found footage (FF) film without being one. As a FF fan, I appreciated the ambience.
