Mehdoob (Night Courier) directed by Ali Kalthami is a sophisticated thriller about a hapless delivery driver caught in societal change in Saudi Arabia.
Zero Hours
by Alexa DalbyMandoob (Night Courier)
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
Saudi Arabia is in a turmoil of rapid social change – new industries, new relationships between the previously segregated sexes, great disparity between the new rich and poor, women driving, cinema… Some Saudis feel this Westernisation threatens their age-old culture.
Hapless Fahad (comedian Mohamad Aldokhei), when we first see him in traditional dress, is working in a call centre, a job which he soon loses. He then desperately works as a food delivery driver in a rainy, night-time Riyadh, with its congested traffic. He is mistakenly in love with an ex-call-centre-colleague Maha (Sarah Taibah), who in her new job embodies the modern office woman, with both male and female co-workers and a (significantly) hated foreign boss. She is waiting for her driving licence.
Fahad comes across a lucrative scam to deliver and sell alcohol (still forbidden) and innocently seizes the opportunity (he thinks) to steal crates of it to raise the money to send his ailing father abroad for treatment. (They also seek charity from a rich sheikh.) This brings him in contact with a new party scene for young people of dance and music as well as alcohol.
What he doesn’t realise is that the alcohol belongs to an organised gang, who are now on his trail for retribution. Meanwhile, his divorced sister Sara (Hajar Alshanmari) is a would-be entrepreneur seeking to meld tradition and modernity and get TV-show funding for her new (she thinks) product.
Fahad still has the traditional old-time moustache and hasn’t quite caught up with all aspects of this changed society he finds himself in. He’s naive and kindly. He sees another world of luxury when he delivers food to the new (celebrity) super-rich in an ultra-modern apartment and he can’t understand.
Director Ali Kalthami paints a sophisticated picture of modern Saudi life, the next step on the path from its first stirrings in Wadjda and The Perfect Candidate. Who knew it rained so much in Riyadh? And who knew that men and (unveiled) women worked together and dined in restaurants together? His film opens and closes in a busy fairground, being one long flashback thriller explaining how Fahad got in whatever situation he is in. A glossy, helter-skelter, thrilling watch, fascinating in what it reveals about a closed society in transition.
Mandoob premiered at the Red Sea Film Festival, screened at TIFF and is released on 30 August 2024 in the UK and Ireland.
