A Swedish whodunit set in the upper echelons ofEgypt's religious hierarchy is sure to make you salivate. That's what Tarik Saleh offers with his latest film, The Cairo Conspiracy, which just won a prize at the 75th Cannes Film Festival for its screenplay. It takes place in Cairo, within a religious university. A special setting, rarely seen in the cinema.
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However, the fact that the director plunges us into such an environment does not prevent the power plays, betrayals, dirty tricks and assassinations inherent in political thrillers. Tarik Saleh has decided to spare no one and denounce a system that is corrupt to the core, that of the Muslim elite, capable of anything to take the place of the Grand Imam.
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More than a behind-the-scenes look at power in Egypt, what interests us here is of course the thriller aspect, which is, on the whole, quite successful. A semblance of an investigation is quickly set in motion, and the main character's infiltration of a group of jihadists plunges the feature into a rather exciting torpor. The only problem is that the script is sometimes rather repetitive.
Soon, a murder at the university panics the Egyptian police, and the investigator in charge of solving the crime enlists Adam's help. This naïve character, who always wants to do the right thing but ends up caught in a spiral from which he can't escape, contrasts with the darkness of Tarik Saleh's work. Without ever being truly surprising, The Cairo Conspiracy remains a good, original film noir.
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