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Review: Seeking Justice After a Rape in ‘Beauty and the Dogs’

Mariam Al Ferjani plays a woman raped by the police in the Tunisian film “Beauty and the Dogs.”Credit...Oscilloscope Laboratories
Beauty and the Dogs
NYT Critic’s Pick
Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania
Crime, Drama
1h 40m

A crescendo of humiliation, anxiety and abuse, “Beauty and the Dogs” plays like a horror movie where every choice is a Catch-22 and every door a trap.

Unfolding over one endless night and nine chapters — each confidently filmed in a single, liquid take — the story (by the film’s Tunisian director, Kaouther Ben Hania) follows Mariam (Mariam Al Ferjani), a young student. Raped by the police after a university party, Mariam, accompanied by a young man she has just met (Ghanem Zrelli), desperately seeks help, first from an indifferent private clinic and then a chaotic public hospital.

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A preview of the film.

“She looks fine,” a bored admitting clerk remarks, noting Mariam’s lack of visible bruises and staring pointedly at her skimpy dress. Uncaring at best and contemptuous at worst, the hospital workers refuse to examine her without her I.D. card (lost during the rape) and a special certificate — which she’ll have to request from the very police station where her attackers work.

Inspired by a true story, Ms. Ben Hania leans hard and heavy on official corruption, oppressive morality codes and a Tunisian bureaucracy dominated by male power. Contrasting the cold sterility of her locations with a fiery emotional urgency, she pushes her increasingly distraught heroine from vulnerability to defiance, from a whimper to a roar.

The result is an unapologetically feminist and furiously single-minded movie that might have benefited from more nuanced characterizations. (The police, in particular, can seem almost cartoonishly callous and leering.) Yet the filmmaking is so striking — and Ms. Al Ferjani so movingly, indefatigably resolute — it’s impossible not to persevere right along with her.

Not rated. In Arabic, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 11 of the New York edition with the headline: Beauty and the Dogs. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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