The beauty trap

Part of an ongoing development journal for The Ogress of Fez, a feature drama about Oum El Hassen and the intersecting forces of empire, gender, and violence. Learn more.

A scene from The Girl with the Needle

I've been wrestling with something since rewatching The Girl with the Needle recently. There's that scene where the protagonist witnesses the kindly abortionist - this woman who helped her - strangling a baby and disposing of it down a public drain. We only see the woman's back as she commits the act. In that moment, it feels more horrifying than any explicit image could be. The betrayal of trust, the casual disposal of life, all suggested through positioning and sound. And it is horrifying, briefly. But then von Horn cuts to this perfectly composed aftermath, light filtering through with a studied beauty, and suddenly I found myself thinking about the cinematography instead of the dead child.

The film offered me an escape route from its own horror. And I’ve found myself being bothered by this more than I expected.

In a circuitous way, it reminded me of the recent Jean Pormanove case in France. Learning about the events that led to this man’s death left me sick for days. In a kind of Black Mirror turned reality, this forty-six-year-old man with obvious learning difficulties was exploited, humiliated, and tortured as part of a live stream staged for the entertainment of paying subscribers. Eventually, when his body could no longer withstand the abuse, his convulsive, rasping gasp of air marked his end, caught live on the stream.

To my shame, curiosity got the better of me and I ended up watching some related clips on X - not even the worst of them, but enough. The image quality was as you’d expect: grainy footage, harsh lighting, reality at its most unforgiving. Besides the disturbing knowledge that the events on screen were very real, there was no aesthetic distance to retreat into, no craft to admire - only the blunt fact of what was unfolding.

Still from the livestream inside the property where Jean Pormanove was tortured.

In The Ogress don't want to make exploitation. But I also don't want to create something so polished that audiences can appreciate the tragedy instead of experiencing it. There's a particular kind of art-house film that makes suffering beautiful, and I'm increasingly convinced this is a form of violence in itself.

I've been thinking about the camera as a colonial instrument. The way it can replicate the very power structures I'm trying to critique. When I wrote the scene of the women being photographed "like statues, unmoving, gazes fixed on us," I was trying to make the audience feel complicit in that colonial gaze. But there's a fine line between exposing that complicity and perpetuating it. The camera always has power over what it captures, and that power carries the legacy of how colonisers looked at colonised bodies - as objects to be catalogued, controlled, consumed. It's that extension of what Laura Mulvey wrote about the male gaze - how the act of looking itself can be a form of violence. And I am also aware, of course, that I am a male screenwriter and director - can I ever escape this trap of the “male gaze” no matter how much I wish to subvert it?

And this thought leads me to reflect on what it means to encounter another person’s face. In real life, that moment of recognition carries weight, it demands something from us. Emmanuel Levinas describes this in Totality and Infinity: the face-to-face encounter places us in a position of infinite ethical responsibility. The face, he argued, cannot be reduced to an image or representation - it always exceeds our attempts to contain it. Cinema fundamentally complicates this. The moment we put a face on screen, we’re already framing it, editing it in some way and making it available for our consumption. The demand of the “face” becomes mediated, contained within an aesthetic object. And yet, there is always something that resists this containment: the irreducible humanity of the person suffering, the part of their reality that slips beyond the image. Perhaps the horror I am trying to evoke lives in that tension. In both what is shown and in what refuses to be shown or said directly.

I also think about the stories we tell each other about trauma - the hesitations, the silences, the ways we phrase things so that meaning has to be read between the lines. Often what matters most is what’s left out. Trauma lives in those absences, in the pauses and omissions that gesture toward something without naming it. To drag everything into the open can feel like another kind of violence - exposure as repetition of harm. Some things shouldn’t necessarily be made visible.

So the question becomes - how do you make a film about what can’t be filmed? How do you represent what resists representation without turning it into spectacle, without betraying it? Maybe the answer is to let the gaps speak - to allow silence, ellipsis, or gesture to carry the weight. The absence itself becomes the form, and the audience feels the pressure of what isn’t there. The horror is in that refusal, in the sense that what matters most will not, and cannot, appear.

When I watched those clips of real violence on X, I paid attention to where the disgust I felt landed in my body. It sat heavy in my chest, tightened my throat, churned in my stomach. It seemed to radiate backwards, prickling at the base of my head and into my ears, as if my insides were trembling. And I think the origin of that feeling - beyond the brutality of the actions I was witnessing - was the recognition of something being fundamentally wrong, that this actions on screen represented a rupture in the order of how humans ought to treat one another. In that sense disgust was doing moral work - it was drawing a boundary, saying this is intolerable.

But I wonder what happens when that feeling is recreated in cinema. Is it a way of bearing witness, or is it simply a lever pulled to provoke a reaction? Studies in psychology suggest that disgust, whether triggered by real encounters or by images on a screen, tends to sharpen judgment. It pushes people toward harsher moral stances, toward condemnation, toward a narrowing of perspective. The same reflex that evolved to keep us safe from rot and disease bleeds into moral life, shaping how we respond to others.

That unsettles me in the context of this film. I begin by asking the audience to empathise with Charifa, the false protagonist who is ultimately murdered. Later I ask for something far harder - to find a trace of empathy for Oum El Hassen, the very perpetrator of violence, a woman who allows and even engineers the abuse of those in her care for the entertainment of her punters. But if disgust tightens judgment, then the risk is clear: instead of moving toward empathy, viewers may only recoil. They may turn away from Oum altogether, refusing her humanity, refusing the complexity of how violence is lived, repeated, survived.

So the question presses harder. If disgust so easily collapses into condemnation, can it ever serve a film that is trying to open space for understanding, especially a film that dares to ask for empathy not only for the victim but also for the one who commits harm?

The communities whose stories I'm trying to tell - they should have agency over how their trauma is represented. It’s about power. Who has the right to transform suffering into art? Who benefits from that transformation? The colonial system I'm depicting was built on taking agency away from colonised people, including the power to control their own narratives. If I'm not careful, I could be perpetuating that extraction through my filmmaking process itself.

I keep coming back to the difference between witnessing and voyeurism. A witness has responsibility - to accuracy, to dignity, to some kind of justice. A voyeur consumes without consent or consequence. The challenge is creating cinema that asks viewers to be witnesses rather than voyeurs. That means positioning them not as passive consumers but as ethically engaged participants who have to grapple with their own complicity.

Maybe the answer is in what happens after the film ends. Does it stay with you as entertainment, or does it change how you see the world? Does it make you more aware of ongoing systems of violence, or does it allow you to feel like you've done your moral duty by watching? I think about those clips of real violence I watched on X - they didn't feel cathartic or resolved. They felt like unfinished business, like something that demanded action or at least deeper understanding.

The beauty trap is real. When suffering becomes beautiful, it stops being urgent. Aesthetic distance can be a form of moral distance. But a complete abandonment of the aesthetic and an embrace of ugliness isn't the answer either - that risks making the content unwatchable, which serves no one. I need to find a visual language that maintains ethical proximity without exploitation. Something that feels real but not sensational. Something that implicates without manipulating. And that is a conversation I’ll need to have with my cinematographer when I (insh’allah) reach that stage.

Honestly, I’ve said it before in this journal, but some days this project feels impossible to realise with all my idealistic goals. I am not solely interested in telling a compelling story, but I am equally if not more interested in how and why this story is being told - every creative decision must be intentional. But maybe that impossibility is exactly where the work needs to live - in the constant tension between the necessity of telling this story and the inadequacy of any way to tell it properly. Not resolution, but responsibility. Not answers, but better questions.

The horror isn't in what we show. It's in what we help people understand about what we don't show. What we make them feel about their own capacity to look away.