★★★★
Majid Al Ansari’s sinister-second-wife chiller is the standout of Fantastic Fest: a slow burn of paranoid tension and supernatural dread; a fierce feminist nightmare told with cultural precision.
The Vile is Majid Al Ansari’s slow-burn horror of jealousy and betrayal, set in the United Arab Emirates and told through the eyes of Amani, a first wife whose life collapses when her husband brings his new bride Zahra into the home. Shot on grainy 16mm, it turns a domestic drama into a story of paranoia and creeping dread, where the question is never just whether Amani is losing her grip, but whether something darker has moved in with them.
Amani is the film’s anchor, mocked, sidelined, and told she’s imagining things, while her daughter Noor looks on. The tension lies in her perspective: is Zahra just an insidious rival, or is she something uncanny, a threat that can’t be explained away?
Meanwhile daughter Noor endures bullying, her isolation mirroring her mother’s. Yet in a cruel twist, the only comfort she finds is with Zahra, the stepmother her mother fears. Those moments of reassurance muddy the ground further: Zahra may be a manipulator, or she may be genuinely nurturing, but either way her bond with Noor deepens the sense that Amani is losing her place in the family.
Zahra is never pinned down. She can seem calculating, sympathetic, or supernatural, sometimes within the same scene. That refusal to resolve keeps the audience unsettled and the threat alive.
Al Ansari builds the unease by turning domestic space against her. Bedrooms, kitchens, and courtyards all shrink into places of suspicion. He avoids the cliché of the hysterical wife, instead giving us a woman forced to measure her sanity against a reality that won’t stay firm. The 16mm texture sharpens the unease. Shadows thicken, candlelight flickers like a warning, colours bleed at the edges. Every frame hums with menace.
What gives the film its bite is the way it links the personal to the systemic. In a society where men rewrite the rules of family at will, horror grows out of the betrayal of women forced to adapt. The supernatural becomes an extension of that trap; The Vile is a fierce feminist nightmare told with cultural precision.
At Fantastic Fest The Vile towers above the competition – to my mind this is most chilling horror of the festival, and with its upcoming London Film Festival slot it looks set to travel even further. Recommended!
The Vile played at Fantastic Fest in Austin, TX
Whitlock&Pope 