‘Boy From Heaven’ Review: Risk-Taker Tarik Saleh Delivers a Conventional Treatment of a Daring Subject

variety.com:

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticElections, as everyone knows, are too important to be left up to chance, and so the world is constantly inventing ways to ensure their outcome in advance.

In Egypt, when it comes to the choice of a new Grand Imam — a lifetime appointment, whose fatwas impact national law — the process doesn’t even pretend to be democratic: The successful candidate is selected from a small Supreme Council of Scholars, with considerations the outside world will never know.

But we can wonder, which is where Swedish-Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh comes in, imagining the equivalent of a John Grisham thriller set inside Cairo’s world-famous Al-Azhar University.Banned from Egypt since 2017’s “The Nile Hilton Incident,” the director may well have nothing to lose by implicating the Egyptian government in a conspiracy to fill the country’s highest religious position with the candidate of the president’s choosing — the equivalent of suggesting the American CIA stuck its hand into the process to decide the last pope.

In the film, no sooner has the last Grand Imam expired than the country’s top brass calls an emergency meeting. “The land cannot support two pharaohs,” announces high-ranking General Al Sakran (Mohammad Bakri), ordering Colonel Ibrahim (Fares Fares) from State Security to see to it that their guy gets elected.