How can we make a film about a national tragedy without naming it? How can we describe the horrors of war, especially when it is fratricidal? In Abou Leila (2020), Amin Sidi Boumédiène returns with unprecedented violence, narrative accuracy, and oppressive aesthetics to Algeria’s dark decade. However, his subject is not the radical movement in 1990s Algeria, nor the hundreds of journalists and intellectuals who were murdered, nor the 200,000 official deaths and just as many disappearances, and certainly not the ambiguous role of the Algerian state at the time and its totalitarian security doctrine. This entire period is crystallized in the form of a single crime, whose anonymous victim is unknown, and a manhunt. This original crime, which initially appears to be a mundane murder, a news item, conditions the actions of the two characters who, in tracking down Abou Leila, are heading toward certain madness. — BOUALEM KHELIFATI