You Resemble Me review – uneven but resonant look at a so-called suicide bomber

The first hour or so of You Resemble Me puts us through all the worst tropes of the modern social realist misery porn film. Our protagonist, Hasna Aït Boulahcen (Lorenza Grimaudo as a child and Mouna Soualem as an adult), is bullied, beaten up and ostracised. Her mother is physically abusive. She is separated from her beloved younger sister and placed into foster care with a family who feed her pork. As an adult, she is sexually abused by men, struggles with substance abuse, and is unable to hold down a job. A visual conceit in the adult years also has Hasna occasionally played by two other actors, as if to represent her fragmented state of mind, but this is under-utilised. It all reeks of material designed for the well-off to tut away at how hard Hasna’s life is.

Those with exceptionally sharp memories may recall the name. Hansa Aït Boulahcen was killed in the days after the November 2015 Paris terror attacks in which 137 people died, and was initially labelled as Europe’s first female suicide bomber, having supposedly killed herself when the police raided a Saint Denis apartment. Further investigation revealed a far more complex story, one where she was not always a willing participant: Hasna did not, it turns out, detonate the explosive. You Resemble Me, the feature debut of Dina Amer, a journalist-turned-filmmaker who covered the Paris attacks at the time for Vice News, is an attempt to reconstruct and reconsider the chain of events leading up to Hasna’s death.

The bulk of this is handled in the final third, when the film finally opens up beyond its insistent misery and starts to consider Hasna’s radicalisation, bringing in documentary and docudrama aspects, refracting what we know of her life with the long-term ripple effects of her death and way the news coverage affected her family. This process is not simple nor morally black-and-white. The terrorist who got his hooks into Hasna did not do so through coercion, but through subtler means, playing on the woman’s desire to be seen and recognised as a meaningful individual: they flirt and joke, send each other Facebook messages and she falls for him.

Amer’s direction also grows more impressionistic: Hasna’s face lit up by the laptop glow against a black background; her frequent gazes into the mirror. It is deeply moving and complex, enriching what has gone on before in a film that desperately needs enriching. As soon as You Resemble Me builds up the confidence to work in a style other than the basic, naturalistic social realism that infects what feels like half of modern European filmmaking, it begins to come out of its shell.

But why does it take so long to get there? One only has to look at Saint Omer, another film reckoning with the racial disparities of modern France, also retelling the facts of a horrid event, to see how such material can be elevated to something progressively radical as soon as one starts to look beyond the constraints of a supposedly objective naturalism. Amer, unfortunately, is unable to find that exquisite resolution without first taking a lugubriously exhausting route that does little to tell Hasna’s story in notes other than misery. And yet, for those willing to push through, You Resemble Me delivers an emotionally touching and ambiguous payoff – one really worth waiting for.

You Resemble Me is released in UK cinemas on 3 February.