A man receives a mysterious call from the mother he has not spoken to in years. She is dying, she tells him, and she wants to see him one last time. So he travels back to the remote date farm where he grew up, deep in rural Saudi Arabia, to make his peace. But the woman waiting for him is not quite the mother he remembers, and the longer he stays among the palms, the clearer it becomes that she has no intention of letting him leave. Something older than either of them has taken root in the family, and it is not done with him yet.

Drawing on mysticism, ‘Soulala’ is an elevated horror about betrayal and witchcraft, and about the cultural obligations we have to our parents: duties of loyalty and care that can be turned, by the wrong hands, into instruments of control. The farm itself becomes a character, its palm groves and shadowed rooms holding generations of secrets, and the dread builds less from what is shown than from what is slowly understood. Rooted in Saudi folklore, it speaks to anyone who has felt the pull of home tighten into a grip. A title that means lineage, and a film about what we inherit whether we want to or not.