A tale of two (difficult) women: Mareike Engelhardt’s Rabia

With an assured, original and complex look at a terrifying current issue, Rabia establishes debutante Mareike Engelhardt as a promising name in contemporary cinema.

One of the most striking aspects of the main competition at the 2025 Off Camera International Festival of Independent Cinema in Krakow was a very clear line woven by the programmers who stitched the selection together. Out of the ten movies selected, seven were directed by women. Moreover, out of the ten, eight featured women—more precisely, young women—as protagonists, and they were told from a specifically female point of view. Of the remaining two, It’s Not My Film (To nie mój film, 2024), the Polish entry directed by Maria Zbaska, is an equal two-hander about a couple going through a relationship crisis.

In the eight films, the young female protagonists faced the task of making life-changing moral decisions in the most classic Aristotelian tradition. And while it should not be the case, this proportion is still so uncommon and extraordinary in film and film festival culture today, that it is impossible not to watch the selection and be reminded of how rare it is to see a group of movies focused on women, their experiences and challenges in contemporary society.

Out of the ten productions, all of them debut features, the most cohesive and well-accomplished was the French-German-Belgian co-production Rabia (2024), directed by German filmmaker Mareike Engelhardt. Inspired by true events, the film follows Jessica (Megan Northam), a young French woman who, along with her best friend Laila (Natacha Krief), leaves her life in France behind and moves to Syria in the hopes of becoming the wife of a Daech combatant. Once they arrive in Raqqa, however, their innocent and foolish dreams of eternal glory and joining the kingdom of heaven turn into a nightmare, when they find themselves trapped in a boarding house for future wives, a ghoulish prison straight out of The Handmaid’s Tale, run by the “Madame” (played by a phenomenal Lubna Azabal).

After Laila finds a husband and leaves her friend to fend for herself, Engelhardt’s film focuses on the complex, violent and unpredictable relationship that unfolds between Jessica and the Madame. The young protagonist is an orphan who lost her mom at an early age, had to take care of her father (instead of the other way around) and—as any gullible, vulnerable teenager—is looking for something that will give meaning to her life and serve as an answer to all her problems, frustrations and shortcomings. Religion, with its easy promises of eternal life, goodness triumphing over evil, redemption and justice after earthly suffering, becomes an attractive way out of the miserable life I which she feels trapped.

Within this context, the Madame will turn into a clear surrogate mother figure: stern and demanding, but also affectionate and caring at times. Their relationship, as if between a mother and a teenage daughter, will be a dance of manipulation and mutual questioning, explosion and tenderness, mirroring and growth. More than enemies, the duo quickly but turbulently begins to see themselves in each other, as two smart women navigating power, control and ambition in a violently patriarchal system not meant to accommodate them.

This mutual recognition is precisely what renders both characters more complex and interesting. It shows how Jessica is not merely a naïve girl willing to submit to a husband in order to feel validated, and how the Madame is not a caricatural one-layered monster exploiting young girls for personal gain. Both of them are ambitious and flawed, humane and calculating, willing to do almost anything—even sacrifice other women—in order to survive an impossible situation.

While Rabia is told primarily from Jessica’s point of view, with Megan Northam’s multi-layered and assured performance deservedly nominated for Female Revelation at the 2025 César, it is Azabal’s Madame that turns out to be the film’s central and most intriguing force. The character, and her portrayal by the Belgian actress—known by cinephiles for her astounding work in Incendies (2010) and, more recently, in The Blue Caftan (Le Bleu du Caftan, 2022)—is an intelligent and self-aware woman, as conscious and critical of her own circumstances and the (a)moral decisions she is making, as of the Western world and how it sees people like her. This nuanced complexity is what prevents Engelhardt’s movie from being another problematic and judgmental look by a white European filmmaker, told from a white European protagonist’s point of view, at a middle-eastern environment in which all the non-white characters are caricatures without subjectivity beyond the clichés of “terrorist” or “extremist”.

Truth be told: Rabia is not at all interested in its male characters. The men are indiscriminate and generic “soldiers,” and potential rapists, to whom Engelhardt is not willing to pay much attention, much like most films directed by men are not particularly interested in the interior lives of their female characters. This is not exactly a flaw, but rather a conscious and deliberate choice that renders Rabia cohesive and focused. The film does not try to engage with or explain the politics of the whole conflict happening outside its central location, as it does not have the time, the scope, and the goal to do so.

In her debut feature as director, Engelhardt is greatly helped by David Chalmin’s precise and omnipresent musical score, accentuating the tension, dangers and unpredictability of its thriller undertones; and by Agnès Godard’s beautiful cinematography, with its Caravaggian chiaroscuros delineating the thin line between dream and nightmare that brings Jessica and Laila to Syria. Intelligently, the film concludes on an open ending, which does not presume to have definitive answers to very complex questions that the protagonists—and the world at large—are unable to resolve. It is a graceful gesture that leaves room for the viewer to draw their own conclusions and judgements about the characters’ questionable and imperfect choices, and which establishes Engelhardt as a promising name, whose next moves we should all be watching closely.

Daniel Oliveira
Edited by Birgit Beumers
©FIPRESCI 2025