Decor

An art director on a B-movie, unhappy with its low standards, finds herself imagining that she is the central character in the film, living a different life...

Not a wholly novel premise (although it does - eventually - end up somewhere unexpected), and at least 20 minutes too long. In its favour, the director's decision to shoot in unflashy monochrome gives it a pleasingly old-fashioned feel, and the cast is excellent - especially Horeya Farghaly, who is the focus of every scene. The burden of making the film feel believable falls on her, and she bears it well.

The film is also a bit of a love letter to the golden age of Egyptian cinema, with numerous old films playing in the background. I am entirely ignorant of Egyptian cinema, but I imagine anyone with an interest in it would find plenty to enjoy in this.

The ending contains quite a neat trick, particularly if you're watching at a festival, as I did...

So I was pretty captivated by the story, but the acting is so odd that you just know something is up from the get go, so the ending is not really surprising. The thing is I can't tell whether this was intentional or not. I can see a big difference between the main character, who unfortunately looks like had one too many botox injections since she is pretty expressionless, and the rest of the cast; while they act a bit strange, I think it's more a way to represent their separation from Maha, who seems to have some mental struggles going. But the actor who plays her has very little "weight", it's almost as if I spent the entirety of the movie waiting for her to come alive and yet she never does. I was so intrigued I even searched for some videos of her and it just feels she is always like that. Apart from that, it's a super nice film, I was pleasantly surprised by the theme, and the fact that it was black and white made sense, it didn't feel pretentious at all.

Honestly this was a great idea for a movie, a really great one but I think it was poorly executed. I'm not complaining as it was good, but I just really wanted it to be better because it could have been. Maged El Kedwani's performance is the best in the movie, followed by Kal Naga. Horeya Farghali seems like a great actor who would've succeeded in some other role. I have this feeling that she was just acting like her real personality which was actually gonna be great if she just managed to let more emotions through to the audience. I think something like this should've been edited and acted in a way that immerses the audience but that didn't happen at all. I'm not going to blame anyone for it but I just feel like this had potential and it got wasted.