Here’s the premise of the crime comedy The Unknown Saint: a thief is being hunted down in the vast Moroccan desert. Just before capture, he buries his loot on a sandy hilltop and disguises it to look like a grave. After serving time in prison, he returns to dig up his loot. But he finds that some people, believing the “grave” to be that of a saint, have built a mausoleum over the grave. Even worse, an entire village has sprung up to support pilgrimage commerce, and the shrine is guarded around the clock.
The thief (Younes Bouab) starts plotting to sneak in and dig up the loot, but he’s got to overcome, among other obstacles, the night watchman’s canine corps. It doesn’t help when he brings in an accomplice so stupid that he doesn’t get that his prison nickname of “Ahmed the Brain” is ironic. And he is surprised when he is not the only nighttime tomb raider.
The thief has to wait in a village filled with eccentrics and small timers on the hustle. The dispensary has a bored young doctor, an aged nurse with a wicked sense of humor, and a waiting room full of “patients” putting on a charade of medical need.
The Unknown Saint is relentlessly deadpan, as all the characters plunge ahead with profound cynicism or earnest absurdity, with at least one critic likening it to Fargo. It’s all very, very funny, especially an unexpected triumph of dog dentistry involving the town barber.
The Unknown Saint is the first feature for writer-director Alaa Eddine Aljem, and it is an auspicious debut. Aljem knows how to use the vastness of the desert to express human futility and how to wring laughs out of human foibles.
The Unknown Saint is Morocco’s submission for this year’s Best International Feature Oscar. The Unknown Saint is streaming from Netflix.
