The Judgment, a unique and stirring film from director Marwan Mokbel, is one-part piercing family drama, one-part sexy reverie, and another part that’s wholly terrifying. When Mo (Junes Zahdi) returns to his Egyptian home after living in the U.S., he and his partner are forced back into the closet. Their ruse must be transparent, however, as Mo begins to believe that a family member has used witchcraft as a punishment for his perceived sins.

Things go bump in the night, surreal visions fill his dreams, and his past traumas start creeping into his present. Although Mo is now a devout atheist, he is confronted with more spiritual concepts of home, sex, love, and self and races to reconcile these horrors, ghostly and not. Casting a sensual spell over the viewers, Mokbel and his crew craft a beguiling and arresting pulse-pounder that uses genre in a direct way to explore queer shame and religion without preachy didacticism.