You Will Die at Twenty movie review (2021) | Little White Lies

You Will Die at Twenty

10 Nov 2021 / Released: 12 Nov 2021

A woman wearing a black robe stands amid a group of figures wearing white robes and red fezzes.
A woman wearing a black robe stands amid a group of figures wearing white robes and red fezzes.
4

Anticipation.

A sadly all-too-rare chance to catch a new work from Sudan on the big screen.

3

Enjoyment.

Spirited and philosophical, if perhaps a little too laconic at times.

4

In Retrospect.

Its quiet profundity strikes you hours, days after viewing.

First-time direc­tor Amjad Abu Alala’s med­i­ta­tive dra­ma con­cerns an exis­ten­tial prophe­cy in a Sudanese village.

With­out mean­ing to sound glib, Amjad Abu Alala’s emo­tion­al­ly tor­tu­ous fea­ture debut plays like a clas­sic movie about teen angst, in which a brood­ing young­ster becomes obsessed with the prospect of his untime­ly demise.

Its sto­ry doesn’t play out in some grey West­ern sub­ur­bia, rather a far-flung Sudanese vil­lage wrought from glow­ing sand­stone in which our brood­ing hero Muza­mil (Mustafa She­ha­ta) must car­ry the exis­ten­tial weight of a death sen­tence hand­ed down to him while just a babe.

The dooms­day clock applied to this boy’s life is the result of a whirling dervish who top­ples over at a tra­di­tion­al cer­e­mo­ny and then counts to 20 – onlook­ers assume the mean­ing to be that Mumazil will die at the moment he reach­es that age.

The film avoids hyper­bole in its thought­ful, philo­soph­i­cal explo­ration of young life sad­dled with a finite expiry date, pon­der­ing whether it should be an excuse for exu­ber­ance and gorg­ing on life expe­ri­ence, or per­haps sit­ting tight and try­ing your best to ward off the incom­ing curse.

At times it’s a lit­tle too pon­der­ous, and some­times strug­gles to bring vari­a­tion and sur­prise to its run­time. Yet this lacon­ic, med­i­ta­tive dra­ma mus­es on the nature of time and the rev­e­la­tion that, even though Muzamil’s predica­ment seems high­ly unlike­ly to the ratio­nal onlook­er, the knowl­edge he accrues is per­ti­nent to all mortals.

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