Locarno review: Boa (2025)
Locarno Film Festival
Pardi di Domani
International Competition
Sacred and profane. Young and old. Religion and urge. Faith and murderous thoughts. A roof that collapsed. Could you fix it by prayer, or is some heavy lifting needed? Monks, snakes and bodybuilders… All of the mentioned could be found in Alexandre Dostie’s short Boa, which has just premiered at Locarno’s Pardi di domani competition.
Leonidas (Dimitri Doré, mesmerising) stands out as the only young monk at the remote convent. With his angelic face and voice, it should not come as a surprise that he is singled out to be the soloist in the choir. However, when a part of the monastery church roof collapses and hurts his mentor Zosimus (Pascal Zipfel), Leonidas starts having second thoughts about his future as a servant of God. The “common” world that once repelled him becomes more and more intriguing to him, especially in the domain of the body. After seeing it on television while on an errand outside the walls, he becomes interested in his own body, bodybuilding and… sexuality. Can he live with his urges, especially when his altercations with his superior, César (Jean-Louis Loca), escalate?
Boa is an example of a so-called elevated horror in a short format. It is not a feature compressed into a short, but it feels natural in its format. Dostie’s idea is streamlined and purified of excessive repetition, the tempo feels fittingly slow, and the psychological momentum in this horror drama builds up naturally.
Every component has been thought through. Vincent Biron’s cinematography, counter-intuitively, seems calmer in the darker tones within the church walls or the muddier ones in the yard than in the naturally or heavily artificial neon lighting of the outer world. Short snippets of Leonidas’ visions and hallucinations are wonderfully edited into the film’s fabric by Jules Saulnier, while Ilaya Ghafouri’s music achieves a certain gothic quality, mixing the sacral with the synth sound.
Frankly, Boa could be seen as disturbing on several levels, but the disturbance it brings is never wrong. Alexandre Dostile does a good job transposing us into his protagonist’s life and mind, suggesting that, no matter how much disturbance he reveals, there is still much more hiding under the surface. If there is a short film that deserves a sequel, this might be the one.
Year: 2025
Runtime: 24′ 57’’
Country: Canada, France
Language: French
Directed by: Alexandre Dostie
Written by: Alexandre Dostie
Cast: Dimitri Doré, Pascal Zipfel, François Sagat, Jean-Louis Loca
Cinematography by: Vincent Biron
Editing by: Jules Saulnier
Music by: Ilaya Ghafouri
Sound by: Ilaya Ghafouri, Harold Hannequin
Production design by: Gabrielle Dosjean
Costume design by: Pauline Jacquard
Produced by: Hany Ouichou, Lucas Tothe, Jessica Arfuso
Production companies: Coop Vidéo Montréal, Punchline Cinema
Distribution by: Travelling Distribution
