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Timbuktu Movie Review

Timbuktu is a 2014 Mauritanian film directed by Abderrahmane Sissako. It is a solid movie that could have been better overall.

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“Where’s forgiveness? Where’s piety?

Where’s exchange… exchange?

Where is God in all this?“

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A cattle herder and his family who reside in the dunes of Timbuktu find their quiet lives – which are typically free of the Jihadists determined to control their faith – abruptly disturbed. This is a very painful, but necessary look into the horrors of Islam and how Islamists are not only terrible human beings, but downright hypocrites.

Yes, that latter part was the most interesting one as it made the movie more sophisticated to showcase the complicated nature of these people and not just paint them as one-note villains. Seeing them like football, but forbid it made me angry and it’s obvious that none of these people have strong opinions about their “faith”, but they just follow what they are told.

Timbuktu is at its best when dealing with these themes of religious fundamentalism and hypocrisy and seeing the struggle of the people in this region was heartbreaking. Surprisingly, the movie did not include a documentarian approach, but a more cinematic one with a more expansive story and numerous characters, which was done for better and for worse.

That choice made the film lived in and worthy of being called a big screen-feature, but unfortunately it led to weaker characterization of everybody present. Satima, Kidane and Toya are the best realized of the bunch and the acting is uniformly quite good and surprisingly great in some instances, but more could have been achieved had they focused on fewer characters and had they hit on just a couple of the arcs and storylines.

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This flaw is even worsened by its overly short runtime. As a result, I find Timbuktu as one of the weaker Oscar nominees for foreign movie in 2014. The direction is solid and the cinematography is quite good, but the lack of a stronger score was bothersome. Overall, it shines a necessary light into this region and their problem with extremist Islamists, but it is no way the best movie dealing with this issue as many critics have pinpointed.

Timbuktu deals with an important issue in a rarely seen region of the world with painfully realistic scenarios and a surprisingly sophisticated tackling of religious extremism and hypocrisy. It’s a well directed and shot movie that is emotionally impactful, but it has an overly short runtime and too many characters, resulting in a film that could have been even stronger had it had better focus.

My Rating – 3.5