The story follows Nejma, played by Oulaya Amamra, a fierce 22-year-old woman working as a ranch hand on a cattle ranch in southern France. Nejma is ballsy and determined to break through in this arena and show that a woman can do as well as any man. She's clearly a more than competent horse rider, having ridden her whole life, and she works hard. She is not interested in any of life's other trappings, like marriage and raising a family, much to the chagrin of her mum. We spend a fair bit of the film right alongside her as she experiences this world filled with sexism and objectification, but also the fragile egos of the men around her.
Despite the macho atmosphere, most of the men are quite nice to her on the face of it, including her in their world and social events as they let off steam together after each 'race'. Nejma makes a pretty good first outing in the arena, earning herself some respect from the blokes. To celebrate this, Nejma joins them for a chaotic night of heavy drinking, drugs and partying out in the swampy pastures where the wild bulls roam free. Pressured and taunted by the men, Nejma winds up past the safety fences, having pretended to them that she was used to recreational drug use. The next morning, she wakes up in the soil with severe memory loss, a hazy recollection of a chaotic struggle and a bloody gash on her arm. Her friends tell her she was attacked and mauled by a rogue bull.
Following this incident, Nejma begins to experience unsettling physical and psychological changes. Her senses heighten, her eyes occasionally turn wide and pitch-black, and she experiences hallucinations and nightmares - including a sequence where she physically feels the sear of a hot iron branding her skin, directly mirroring how we saw her do it early on in the film to a bull. Over time, she even notices her toes fusing and hardening into a kind of webbing that resembles hooves!
Simultaneously, a wave of terror grips the community. A mysterious, rogue bull begins brutally hunting, goring and stomping the males to death under the cover of night. As the bodies pile up, the local men form a posse to hunt down the killer. They pin the blame on Nejma’s favourite bull, Thunder. Despite Nejma's desperate protests, the men slaughter Thunder. However, after Thunder is killed, Nejma continues to black out at night, waking up covered in fresh blood that she is forced to wash away in secret. She realises she can feel the bulls and hear them screaming inside her head.
Amamra in the lead, appearing in pretty much every scene, is superb. She is totally convincing and great to watch. The direction, production and cinematography have been beautifully orchestrated with great use of shadow, texture, lighting and colours. The blazing white of the arena contrasts hugely with the scenes back at base, which are often at night with red glows inside the convincing sets. Then there are the nighttime, sinister-looking shots of the bulls amongst the mist and great long-shots and panning when Nejma heads off to the beach riding her horse.
It's an interesting film and well worth tracking down if you can find it. It's on limited release, mainly in Europe, so some smart VPN shenanigans might be needed. I suggest starting on Amazon Prime Video in Germany! Or wait. Or track it down at an arthouse cinema in Paris!
To round things off, spoiler alerts apply to this last paragraph.
It turns out that all was not quite as it seemed the night she passed out and the men of the group (or at least one of them) brutally raped her. Enter the body-horror element and Nejma taking matters into her own hands in order to right the wrongs done to her throughout the story - especially that night - through violent vengeance against man and/or beast, you could say! There's a shape-shifting transformation sequence in the style of An American Werewolf in London as she changes into a half-human, half-bull creature to snuff out the offenders!
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