Cairo Conspiracy film review — jittery thriller set in a seat of Islamic learning

Put simply, the stark and flinty Cairo Conspiracy is a thriller: the tale of an innocent snared in the power games of contemporary Egypt. But it begins in the mode of A Star is Born. Provincial fisherman’s son Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) is newly accepted at Al-Azhar University, Cairo, the world’s most prestigious centre of Islamic education, teaching the clerics of the future. “May God bless you with learning!” his awestruck cab driver exclaims under the minarets.

Barhom is a smart casting choice. At once boyish and earnest, he inhabits a character desperate to make the best of himself here, where the lessons of the Koran are presented as eternal. But men are not, as evidenced by the death of the university’s grand imam. The vacancy at the top of an institution this crucial is not likely to remain so for long. The military have a favoured cleric they want to see installed; the supporting role of stooge falls to Adam, recruited by a colonel to act as his informant in Al-Azhar. “We don’t forget those who work for us,” he says. Even a naïf can hear both sides of that.

Director Tarik Saleh has a sharp eye for the quotidian detail of organised religion. (An early scene finds Adam’s hometown imam hoovering the mosque.) He is good too at conjuring the jitter of downtown Cairo, where the student is summoned to meet his handler. But the film’s biggest coup is the common thread it finds in both worlds: military back rooms and holy offices alike filled with the ambitious jostling for position.

If the story can sometimes feel overcompressed, Saleh reserves a chilly clarity for the suggestion of an ongoing pact between Egyptian generals and clerics, mutually invested in the status quo. (The film was shot in Turkey and Sweden.) He also gives the best line to Adam, left to voice the bitter truth of what he learns of faith and government: “Does it matter what I believe, sir?”

★★★★☆

In UK cinemas from April 14