The Nile Hilton Incident

“You can’t buy dig­ni­ty son” are the words uttered by the father of Noredin Mostafa (Fares Fares) a cor­rupt, chain-smok­ing police­man to his son. This line encap­su­lates the pow­er, cor­rup­tion and lies at the core of Tarik Saleh’s polit­i­cal thriller The Nile Hilton Inci­dent. Set in Cairo over the course of the month lead­ing up to the inter­net-fuelled 2011 Egypt­ian rev­o­lu­tion, the film rides on the impend­ing explo­sion of col­lec­tive frus­tra­tion which is slow­ly ris­ing to the surface.

The film begins with the mur­der of a famous night­club songstress in a lux­u­ry hotel whose sole wit­ness is a Sudanese migrant maid named Sal­wa (Mari Malek). Noredin’s lazy and desul­to­ry col­leagues rule it as sui­cide, but some­thing doesn’t seem right and, as the inves­ti­ga­tion begins to unrav­el, this unlik­able, cor­rupt detec­tive is lead straight into the heart of the rul­ing elite.

In the back­ground the white noise of Hos­ni Mubarak blares on TV as he announces his plans to rebuild Egypt and preach­es moral right­eous­ness. What begins to unfold is a series of bleak but rev­e­la­tions which exem­pli­fy the anger and state of polit­i­cal tur­moil in the coun­try at the time. Pow­er­ful men of pure self-inter­est break and destroy lives for sport while ful­ly acknowl­edg­ing the lack of reper­cus­sions. Despite Noredin’s com­plic­it actions, his sense of moral ambi­gu­i­ty is ques­tioned on the case and we see a con­flict­ed fig­ure with a gen­uine­ly sense of decen­cy and per­sis­tence who begins run­ning into dan­ger over time.

Nav­i­gat­ing around the bustling cityscape, Cairo is pre­sent­ed out the dash­board of Nordein’s car as a drowned in sound dystopia with seedy goings-on in dim­ly lit back streets and cor­ners. One mem­o­rable sequence fol­lows Mubarak into an exclu­sive club, he lights a cig­a­rette and mood­i­ly observes an arche­type female fatale croon­ing into a micro­phone rem­i­nis­cent of the film’s noir influences.

As the film reach­es its soul wrench­ing finale, ten­sion builds between Noredin and his moral­ly-ques­tion­able col­leagues as the mys­tery draws to a close while the immi­nent throngs of pro­test­ers come togeth­er to top­ple Mubarak. The film asks you, then, to dis­agree with Noredin’s father orig­i­nal state­ment: in fact, dig­ni­ty can be bought.