Amal Al-Agroobi’s LADIES COFFEE adds a Middle Eastern touch to horror shorts

When it comes to horror films, they often need a well-planned, believable, and coherent structure to engage the audiences and make sure they’re reacting to them in the way the filmmakers intended. That’s why horror films are usually feature-length narratives, so the details can be spread out over enough space to create the desired effect.

However, in the case of Amal Al-Agroobi’s British-Arab short LADIES COFFEE, the film still manages to create the same effect in less than ten minutes with an enjoyable and cohesive film, distinguishing itself from other horror flicks with a story that weaves Arab identity and Middle Eastern traditions with H.P. Lovecraft’s brand of cosmic horror to create a new type of shocking thriller.

LADIES COFFEE — which was recently screened at the Arab Women Artists Now (AWAN) Film Festival — was able to use the distinctive Arab tradition of reading (or divining) a coffee cup to create a horror that Arab viewers can identify with and understand immediately.

The divination ritual of reading a coffee cup goes back hundreds and even thousands of years, and despite the uncertainty behind its origin and how it began, Arabs have been practicing this ritual since ancient times, and it’s one of the traditions that most expresses Arab identity and is usually ever-present in evening coffee sessions among women in particular, with older women usually doing the divination.

These rituals have become a reliable source of revealing secrets, knowing the future, and having a deeper understanding of the personality of the coffee drinker for many people, and have become so much of a staple in Arab communities that there has been so much art and even music made about it, with the most famous being Abdelhalim Hafez’s Egyptian song KAREAT AL FENGAN (THE CUP READER).

When it comes to how the ritual must be performed, there are a few rules, such as the fact that the coffee itself needs to be Arabic or Turkish and that it needs to be poured into cups with white interiors that come with saucers, then placing the saucer on top of the cup after finishing the drink, sloshing the covered remains thrice clockwise, then inverting the cup onto the saucer and letting the coffee sediments settle for a few minutes.

This is how the film’s events take place when Roula invites Zeina and her daughter Reem over for an Arabic coffee matinee in her ornate house that’s filled with statues and paintings. Young Reem is then encouraged to participate in a coffee cup reading ritual that goes awry, exposing her to horrifying otherworldly forces that she can no longer unsee nor unhear, inevitably leading her to an endless downward spiral into madness.

It’s clear that Al-Agroobi opted not to resort to popular Western antics when it comes to her own horror film, but rather, she built her story on a simple deviation that occurs within a coffee reading ritual, and this is what makes the film authentic and loyal to its Arab identity.

LADIES COFFEE is written and directed by Amal Al-Agroobi and stars Amira Al- Shanti, renowned British Jordanian actress Rania Kurdi, Faten Omary, and Nadia Lamin.