The Blue Elephant

Doctor Yehia has spent five years drinking and hiding after losing his wife and daughter. When he returns to work he is posted to the hardest ward of the El Abbaseya psychiatric hospital, the unit that assesses the sanity of the criminally accused. His first case is an old friend, charged with killing his wife and remembering none of it. At a certain point the film stops being a procedural and becomes a question of belief. The blue pill Yehia uses experimentally shows him the past, but whether what he sees is illness or fact is left open to the end. Local belief in djinn sits beside the language of psychiatry, and neither one defeats the other. Marwan Hamed directed, from Ahmed Mourad's 2012 novel. Karim Abdel Aziz plays Yehia, Khaled El Sawy his friend, Nelly Karim his wife. The box office result was emphatic: one million two hundred thousand tickets sold over the Eid al-Adha season of 2014, takings above thirty-five million Egyptian pounds, and a widely repeated claim that it reset the standard for visual effects in Egyptian cinema. Who it is for: anyone who wants psychological thriller and supernatural ambiguity together. Who it is not for: anyone who wants a clear answer. The film runs over two hours and its last half hour loses tension.