Cannes Review: Tarik Saleh’s ‘Boy From Heaven’

deadline.com:

It’s early days at the Cannes Film Festival, so awards prognostication might seem a little premature, but still, it’s hard to imagine that the phenomenal performance given by Swedish-Lebanese actor Fares Fares in Tarik Saleh’s searing political thriller Boy from Heaven will go entirely unnoticed by this year’s jury.

Topping the work he did in Saleh’s 2017 Sundance hit The Nile Hilton Incident, Fares commands the screen from the moment he arrives, playing a character whose disheveled appearance conceals a ruthless efficiency, a laser-focused mind and an entirely pragmatic concept of morality.It’s funny that Boy from Heaven should premiere after James Gray’s Armageddon Time, another film about a young man’s rude awakening and another film that ruminates on the way fate is shaped — or dictated — by race and class.

But Saleh’s film throws religion into that already-volatile mix, and while it doesn’t swerve the delicate issues that come with any discussion of radical Islam, Boy from Heaven shows a rare level of philosophical engagement with the subject, something that pays off beautifully in its articulate and nuanced last act.The nominal star of the film is Adam (Tawfeek Barhom), the son of a poor Egyptian fisherman who lives with his widowed father and two brothers in a tiny seaside village.

Without telling his domineering father, Adam has been studying privately, resulting in the offer of a scholarship to the prestigious Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a power base of Sunni Islam.