At The Movies: Cannes winner Boy From Heaven a chilling thriller set in Cairo’s Al-Azhar

Boy From Heaven (PG)

126 minutes, opens on Thursday exclusively at The Projector 4 stars

The story: The death of a Grand Imam opens up a succession struggle at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the epicentre of Sunni Islam, where a young scholar becomes a pawn between Egypt’s corrupt powers in this 2022 Cannes Film Festival best screenplay winner.

Eight years ago in Egypt, production for The Nile Hilton Incident, a 2017 noir about police malfeasance, was officially shut down and director Tarik Saleh forcibly removed from the country.

The Swedish-Egyptian film-maker must not mind staying away, because his espionage thriller Boy From Heaven (also known as Cairo Conspiracy) is even more damning of the authorities.

Tarik, filming mostly in Turkey’s Suleymaniye Mosque, does an impressive job of recreating the hallowed Al-Azhar, with its history dating back to the 10th century.

Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) is a fisherman’s son newly arrived on a scholarship, and his awe is as much the audience’s. But then the naive provincial boy witnesses a classmate’s murder.

The victim was a government informant and Adam is strong-armed by a wily intelligence agent, Colonel Ibrahim (an excellent Fares Fares), into being the replacement. His orders are to spy on the students and clerics, and manipulate the election to favour an imam of the regime’s choice.

The chicaneries and treacheries play out in the vast complex of prayer halls, chambers and corridors. The story benefits hugely from its strong sense of place. There is danger everywhere.

The awful dramatic tension is undiminished by a too-neat ending, and the religious and political elites are chilling in their immorality as they jockey for power.

Adam, so out of his depth, may survive infiltrating a viperous campus cell of jihadists, though almost certainly not the state security bosses, whose plan is to kill him when they are done using him.

Hot take: This conspiracy tale of unholy deeds will grip and rattle.

The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry (PG13)

108 minutes, opens on Thursday 3 stars

The story: Jim Broadbent stars as British pensioner Harold Fry, who receives word one morning that an old workmate is dying. He sets out to mail her a letter and, on impulse, ends up trekking across England to bid her farewell in person.

Five hundred miles – more than 800km – is the distance Harold walks, without proper boots or even a map from his Devon village to his friend Queenie’s (Linda Bassett) hospice in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

Adapted by Rachel Joyce from her 2012 Man Booker Prize-longlisted bestseller of the same title, The Unlikely Pilgrimage Of Harold Fry is a sentimental, if laudably uncynical, fable of secular faith and human connection.

“As long as I walk, she must live” is Harold’s mantra. He believes the hope of his visit will sustain Queenie, when in fact it is himself he is saving. Has he ever been this alive, feeling the earth under his feet and feeding on wild berries?

The epic adventure is his first after 65 years of a dull, passionless life.

Along the way, Harold reflects on the strangers he meets, many of them joining his pilgrimage to cheer him on, and those he left behind – namely, his tragically estranged son (Earl Cave) and a strained marriage.

His journey of grief-stricken self-reckoning could have been mawkish, were it not for English director Hettie Macdonald’s casting of the marvellously nuanced Broadbent.

Better still is Penelope Wilton as the hurt, bewildered and terrified wife, who agonises over what Queenie means to her husband and whether he will come home, but is helpless to do anything except angrily vacuum.

Hot take: Broadbent never puts a blistered foot wrong in an unassuming road movie that rues a wasted life, but offers a second chance.