The Secret Men Club

Khaled Al-Halafawi's 2019 Egyptian comedy concerns a secret club where married men gather to get away from their wives. Adham brings his friends into it, while his own ten-year marriage begins to shake because his wife follows him to find out what he is hiding. The template is classic: men wanting to escape and women disrupting it. The comedy rests largely on the timing of Karim Abdel Aziz and Maged El Kedwany. The narrative problem is that what it says about marriage stays on the surface and the women are mostly constructed as obstacles; the reconciliation in the final section does not fix that. It did well commercially in Egypt and represents the comic tendency of the period. Who it's for: viewers who like mainstream Egyptian comedy. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a more considered approach to marriage and gender roles, or troubled by women characters built as obstacles.