Dark Domesticity: Unreliable Narrators in ‘The Vile’
- Shanai Tanwar
- 4 minutes ago
- 4 min read
Emirati director Majid Al Ansari’s latest feature, The Vile (2025), is a masterclass in bringing the modern Gothic to your doorstep. When Amani, a loving wife and mother, finds herself playing second fiddle to the new (and younger) bride her husband ushers in without telling her, her life begins to unravel from the inside out, outside in. The hour and a half that follows narrates the lives of Amani and her daughter Noor as they straddle the fine line between nightmares and reality, insanity and coherence.
Scripted entirely in Arabic, The Vile transports its viewers to a desert landscape in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, where large mansions sprout like mirages. For viewers like myself who grew up in the Gulf, the palettes of blue and pale, sandy shades are a throwback to years spent flitting between air conditioning and record-breaking heat. Though the few sequences of light in the outdoors provide a welcome contrast to the dark, moody tones indoors, it is in the darkness of Amani’s home that claustrophobia festers.
Khalid introduces his new bride to his wife of several years and promptly heads off on a work trip. He rationalizes his betrayal towards his family by centralizing his desire for a son, a demand Amani was unable to satisfy due to an earlier miscarriage. His new bride, Zahra, we learn, is already pregnant with the promise of a son on the way. Blinded by his want for a male heir to continue his bloodline, Khalid doesn’t take a second to consider how his choices are unjust to his daughter, a teenager who believes her family life to be one of domestic bliss. “You’ll have to adjust,” he tells her, encouraging her to convince Amani to come around to this new and uninvited presence in her house.
Amani finds her home infiltrated by Zahra’s loud music and polluted by unwelcome flowers and decor, with only her grief for company. Noor, who becomes a victim of bullying at school by the resident mean girls who mock her new family dynamic, initially sympathizes with her mother and provides support. However, this quickly changes as Zahra’s bewitching schemes to establish intimacy as Noor’s “second” mother gain traction and Noor’s loyalties seem to shift away from Amani.
Although Al Ansari’s plot revolves around polygamous relationships in the Middle East, he suggests that his work is not to be taken as a comment on polygamy in general. Instead, he highlights that the commentary he makes is targeted towards the betrayal Amani experiences as a wife whose husband does not ask for her consent before marrying again. In a Q&A after the screening, Al Ansari noted that he wanted to approach the subject carefully in a culturally sensitive way while experimenting with genre. “I wanted to make a film that was infused within our culture in the genre I love, which is horror and thriller,” he said. The research process involved interviews with families from the UAE to Saudi Arabia to grasp the regional diversity of the subject matter.
Imbuing horror to a topic that has predominantly appeared in dramatic genres is a unique stylistic choice, and one that defines The Vile as a cutting-edge innovation from Emirati cinema. While the movie is ripe with scares reminiscent of Paranormal Activity — lights and televisions flicker on and off dramatically, items disappear only to be found someplace entirely different — perhaps the most haunting images occur in the penultimate scenes. Noor, unable to resist Zahra’s seductive attempts at mothering her, grapples with the haunting reality of her situation in a dreamlike tug of war on her birthday. Amani, on the other side of the same door, is jolted into a traumatic replay of her miscarriage and subsequent fall from her husband’s favour. It’s a shocking, dizzying spell from which mother and daughter break free to reunite with the realization that they only had each other, all along. By the end of The Vile, you’ll be questioning whose version of events occurs in real time, and whose is purely metaphorical.
Bdoor Mohammad’s performance as Amani is especially commendable. She skilfully portrays her character’s gradual descent into paranoia and madness through evocative expression that highlights her helplessness. Sarah Taibah, who plays Zahra, is incredibly convincing and makes a poignant case for how beauty can conceal shadowy pasts. It’s important to note that as Amani becomes a dishevelled outsider in her own home, Zahra’s parasitic prowess grows simultaneously.
Notably, both the male catalysts of the storyline—Khalid and the unborn son he so selfishly desires—are absent for the majority of the film. At the end, both appear on screen—long after Amani and Noor have abandoned Khalid in search for their own peace—nestled in the family home that has overgrown with parasitic weeds. In a captivating twist, Zahra flips the script and reveals to Khalid that it was she who was using him all along to provide for herself and her son, who isn’t even fathered by him. It makes for a sublime, cathartic resolution as Khalid finds himself as the isolated other, and all the female characters have since gained agency.
Deeply moving, disturbing and paranoid, The Vile is a stellar example of how strong female leads can drive a storyline that is, ironically, based on tearing them apart. It’s a nail-biting watch for any horror fan who can appreciate well-constructed social commentary, and is an exciting addition to the oeuvre of emerging films coming out of the Middle East that will leave you with a curiosity for more.
Edited by Hannah Tang, Co-Editor of Film & TV
