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Four Daughters Movie Review

Four Daughters is a 2023 documentary film directed by Kaouther Ben Hania. It’s a very interesting, experimental film.

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“What a bunch of whores“

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Between light and darkness stands Olfa, a Tunisian woman and the mother of four daughters. One day, her two older daughters disappear. Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania invites professional actresses to fill in their absence. Nominated for an Oscar for best documentary feature, this movie is considered to be one of the best documentaries for 2023 and for a good reason as it is a very original film.

This experimental feature blurs the line between fiction and documentary, which is a current trend for documentaries that is bound to stay with us for the foreseeable feature. But this movie is different than usual in its fictional elements being reenactments where professional actresses are brought in to replace the real women at hand.

Obviously, this type of approach can feel morally objectionable, and I did feel icky watching it at first, but when I became used to the format, I’d come to really appreciate what Kaouther Ben Hania did with this idea. This movie is a much more confident feature from this director, much better than her previous effort ‘The Man Who Sold His Skin’.

The best parts of Four Daughters are the family scenes where the mother talks to the daughters and we see a lot of their playful bickering and differing opinions about the world and women’s roles in society. The movie deals with the theme of feminism in a subtle, sophisticated way by painting all of these women as being unique and different from each other in personalities and life experiences.

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The acting is great, the directing is fantastic and the movie is solidly edited and paced. The structure worked for me, though the third act dealing with the disappearance of these two women was somewhat rushed and underutilized, especially the entire Islamic State involvement narrative. The movie should have dealt better with this issue, but the family drama worked and this is where the movie shined.