One ordinary night in a working-class neighborhood of the Algerian capital, a suspicious car drives along a street where several children play carelessly. The driver lures a young girl to the window and violently pulls her inside before driving away as the girl’s brother looks on in despair. The unsettling incident, inspired by real events, ignites the occasionally tense, if mostly dramatically inert social thriller “Algiers,” the country’s Oscar international feature submission, from writer-director Chakib Taleb-Bendiab.
Tensions are already running high in this town due to water shortages (as a radio announcement informs), and the knowledge that a predator is roaming around adds fuel to the fire with irate local men trying to find the culprit on their own. The official investigation faces its own obstacles, as inspector Sami Sadoudi (Nabil Asli) clashes with Dr. Dounia Assam (Meriem Medjkane), a psychiatrist who specializes in post-traumatic disorders. Their disparate approaches must reluctantly come together to find the child within the first 48 hours (after which the chances of finding her alive decrease drastically).
Based on the rattled boy’s testimony, Dounia soon concludes that the perpetrator has likely done this before. Her theory seems speculative at best, but Medjkane’s portrayal of determination intrigues Sadoudi. The plot moves along driven by several other flimsy conjectures viewers are asked to accept without substantial evidence other than her convenient discoveries. It’s not that anything entirely implausible occurs, but the efficiency with which the pieces of the puzzle come together feels narratively contrived. The neighbors suspect a disabled homeless man who lives in a nearby parking lot, but once that lead fails to yield concrete results, Medjkane’s educated inferences gain prominence.
By Sadoudi’s side is Khaled (Hichem Mesbah), a grizzled veteran officer who was around during the civil war of the early 1990s and believes that police are justified to use force against their adversaries. That righteous, above-the-law mentality takes hold of him during a crucial moment late in the disturbing case. However, if Bendiab’s intentions were to extrapolate the unrest that occurred over 30 years ago as the source of current social ills in Algeria, the writing doesn’t really get that point across — at least not for those unfamiliar with the specifics of what transpired then. That ideological divide between Sadoudi and Khaled is most potently represented in a morally complicated stand-off with a potential killer in the aftermath of a gruesome discovery. Cinematographer Ikbal Arafa focuses his camera solely on the eyes of the four men involved, each hoping for a different outcome
That Taleb-Bendiab plants multiple thematic angles but doesn’t follow through with any of them renders “Algiers” more schematic than hard-hitting, and leaves all of its characters’ motivations unexplored. What’s missing from “Algiers” is an incisive examination as to why this moment and this city created the conditions for a monstrous individual to operate with such impunity for more than two decades. There are hints at what the answer could be, but the connections between these distinct issues and the unfortunate event at the center of the film seem tenuous. The absence of cohesiveness ultimately diminishes its emotional impact.
Bendiab’s protagonists feel like bigger enigmas than the case they are desperate to solve, archetypes whose personalities and personal histories are only superficially revealed. Medjkane’s believably gloomy performance communicates the gravity of what’s at stake. The revelation that she was recently a victim of an attack and that her father died should presumably help one understand her resolve. Yet her investment is undermined by how ambiguously and hurriedly it’s disclosed. Meanwhile, Asli loosely sketches Sadoudi by quoting “The Art of War” and airing his grievances with the law enforcement establishment. One can assume that his irritable demeanor derives from the stress of the job in a chaotic city, but there’s little else to glean from his behavior. To an extent, Khaled’s transparent eagerness to leave the force and to make his own rules feels radical.
Confirming one of the screenplay’s shortcomings, Bendiab’s “Algiers” never returns to the girl’s brother or the woman who cares for them, nor does it dig into who the other suspects were and how they were roped into the crime. The final minutes rely on Dounia’s heroism to wrap the ordeal with an unearned neatness. Near the conclusion as Sami and Dounia go into the night, protesters walk around them, gathering to demand access to water. It’s in that scene that Bendiab succeeds in capturing a fascinating truth about urban spaces: The story of the missing kid is only one among millions in this complex environment, and for most, it will go unnoticed. Still, despite some compelling instances, “Algiers” fails to congeal into a consequential portrait of a city and its afflictions.
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