In the Flesh: The Nile Hilton Incident (Patreon)

I can’t think of anything from last year as blackly funny as the corrupt cop in The Nile Hilton Incident who orders room service next to a woman’s corpse and tells the waiter to charge it to the room. Tarik Saleh’s stylish neo-noir may be as dark as pitch, but it’s neither precious nor ponderous about human nature. With complete disinterest in holding the viewer’s hand it spins a tale of bribery, widespread systemic corruption, social unrest, rival government cliques, and misogynist brutality enthralling in its ambiguity. Saleh, once a professional graffiti artist, brings the same level of complex sophistication to his shots of Cairo, a city portrayed as caught between the twin poles of decay and predatory redevelopment. Dark alleys festooned with hanging wires, cracked shower stalls where water dribbles fitfully from rusted heads, chipped paint and sagging ceilings — there is a feeling not so much of age as of shoddiness, that nothing here was built to last. Scenes of empty desert lit by firelight reinforce the desolation surrounding the city, waiting for a chance to reclaim it from the brief blip of human industry.

From the hooded, reptilian stare of the nameless killer (Slimane Dazi) to Salwa’s (Mari Malek) charmingly crooked teeth and crooked cop protagonist Noredin’s (Fares Fares) hawkish medieval profile, The Nile Hilton Incident is a banquet of unusual faces. The amount of character conveyed through simple diversity of facial appearance shames cookie cutter Western casting practices and allows for a much deeper investment in the film’s world. These people are beautiful, sometimes astoundingly so, but not in a way that pushes you out of the fiction. It’s easy to imagine them as people you might meet in the course of your own life, their faults and virtues poignant and relatable. It lends a horrible intimacy to the film’s infrequent scenes of life or death struggle, as when the killer ducks into the back of Noredin’s car in an attempt to kill Salwa, a scene less than three seconds long and yet horrifyingly tense and immediate.

Fares gives an admirably layered performance as Noredin, whose motives are often semi-opaque. In some ways he’s the prototypical noir protagonist, a cynical detective seldom without a cigarette, nursing old wounds and flirting with collapse. In others he more closely resembles a struggling teenager, as in his desperation for his uncle Kammal’s (Yasser Ali Maher) approval and his impulsive moral decision-making. As the first riots of the Arab Spring brew in the city’s uneasy streets, Noredin lets his guilty conscience drag him deeper and deeper into the case of the murdered woman to whose room his fellow officer, standing beside her corpse, charged his shrimp and mango. Even when he learns the truth and finds his witness, the city itself resists him. Suspects die in custody. Anonymous government ministers call in shady favors. The killer is revealed as a state security agent. Corruption has so permeated Mubarak’s regime that it no longer exists as a coherent entity, just clades of rival profiteers fighting over people and money like starving dogs over spoiled meat.