Red Path review - the dead know everything

Here’s a film you might not feel like seeing. After all, Red Path tells of a 14-year-old in Tunisia who is forced to carry home the head of his teenage cousin after the cousin is executed by jihadists. But see the film you really should.

In an opening 10 minutes of pre-title exuberance, goat-herders Achraf (Ali Helali) and Nizar (Yassine Samouni) are seen fooling about, looking for water, helping a lost baby goat and sunbathing in mountains above the plains where they live, bouncing among canyons sculpted in umpteen shades of tan and salmon, and speckled with extremists.

Like wolves descending in this officially forbidden zone, a band of mujahideen jumps them and immobilises Achraf. Nizar is beheaded and Achraf is told: “Take this back to his mother.” It will teach the two boys and their kind “to shut their mouths”.

The trail of anguish that follows, as Achraf comes off the mountain with a bloodied cargo in a blue knapsack, stands for the many journeys and exiles forced on the weak by selfish men with weapons – Achraf’s weathered face burdened with grief and survivor guilt and other pains best forgotten.

This frame-perfect movie by Lofti Achour is based on a real-life incident a few years after the Arab Spring of 2011 when former state dead-enders and terrorists were re-asserting control over the Tunisian rural poor. It’s meticulously paced, beautifully shot and brilliantly cast with mostly first-time actors. The wide-screen lensing of cinematographer Wojciech Staron captures the flatlands and peaks of central Tunisia in all manners of light, vistas like the sad wilderness expanses in Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Once Upon a Time in Anatolia.

So Achraf gets back to his and Nizar’s village – a small compound consisting of little more than a single concrete room. Grief is often dead space in movies and hurdled over, but it’s made tangible and productive here. Latifa Gafsi, one of the more experienced players, is Nizar’s mother and her mourning at hearing the news and seeing the head is searing and detailed, amid dim interiors and lined faces shot in Caravaggio-like chiaroscuro. She shows the time-crunching effects of grief, the weight and slow relief of hour added to hour.

The film’s determined hold on practicality means that the head is put into the village’s single fridge. A similar note of realism infects Rahma (Wided Dabedi), a teenage mate of both Achraf and Nizar. Achraf gives her the baby goat rescued from the mountain. She admits that Nizar loved her but he was a suitor, she says bluntly, she wouldn’t have married. He’ll know that now, she adds, because “the dead know everything”. Then, with loaded optimism: “The adults will know what to do.”

In the second half of the film, the adults – led by Nizar’s impulsive brother (Younes Naouar) – return to the perilous mountain to retrieve the rest of Nizar’s body, after the local cops have proved impossible to rouse into action.

The recovery party is pursued by the haunted Achraf, trying to put his own head back together as visions of his old friend appear to him to provide worldly advice and images of bygone martyrs. The internet, of all things, offers up clues: everyone knows less or more than they think as the story takes on some of the air of a crime mystery.

Throughout his unflinching and delicate movie, Achour avoids portraying the put-upon villagers as victims drained of life and agency. Foolhardy, brave or compromised, they resist being herded by subjugators lurking just out of sight – embattled figures in a barren landscape who know how to inhabit and survive it better than outsiders.

This “small” film is a big canvas of resilience and introspection and weeping. People may not flock to it, but the distributor deserves credit for putting it out because it’s the kind of reason many of us grew up needing cinema.

• More film reviews on theartsdesk