Safe Exit Is Devastatingly Ordinary

In 2015, in the Libyan coastal city of Sirte, the terrorist group ISIS released a video showing twenty Egyptian Coptic Christians and one Ghanaian being beheaded on the shores of the Mediterranean. All twenty-one wore orange jumpsuits, a reference to the clothing worn by detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The footage documented a massacre, a calculated act of psychological warfare and propaganda intended to showcase the group’s proclaimed ruthlessness.

Each of the victims who were slaughtered that day had lives, journeys, ambitions, stories to tell, and countless people behind them. It is from this point that Safe Exit, an Egyptian film released this year, written and directed by Muhammad Hammad, begins to tell its story.

Troubled Existence

Set in contemporary downtown Cairo, Safe Exit follows Samaan, a 23-year-old Coptic Christian working as a night-shift security guard in a residential building. Still haunted by the childhood trauma of witnessing his father’s murder at the hands of ISIS in Libya, he suffers from chronic post-traumatic stress, and struggles with isolation, financial hardship and an overwhelming fear of violence.

Living in a small rooftop room, detached and leading an almost withdrawn existence, he spends his nights writing stories and nurturing the ambition of publishing his first novel.

His mundane routine begins to unravel when he encounters Fatimah, a young Muslim woman who arrives at the building seeking medical attention for recurring seizures. Poor, homeless and without identification papers, she struggles to find somewhere to stay. After sleeping with Amm Araby, the building’s daytime security guard, in the hope of securing shelter, she is eventually turned away and finds herself seeking refuge with Samaan.

Their uneasy encounter gradually develops into an unexpected friendship. Fatimah’s expressive, outspoken and remarkably resilient personality contrasts sharply with Samaan’s introversion and emotional withdrawal. She challenges his understanding of life and experience, drawing him into situations he would otherwise have avoided, and gradually breaking down the walls he has built around his trauma.

When she is eventually diagnosed with a brain tumour requiring an operation she cannot afford, her already precarious circumstances become even more desperate.

Meanwhile, a far more unsettling situation is unfolding in the building: Samaan finds himself entangled with Abdullah, a young extremist and wanted terrorist hiding from the police, who is prepared to blow himself up with an explosive belt to avoid arrest.

Torn between his fear, his sense of helplessness and the moral weight of the situation, Samaan is forced to confront the very violence that has defined his life since childhood. And beneath all of this lies his survivor’s guilt: he was with his father in Libya, yet survived the massacre.

Through its diverse cast of characters and the microcosm of society embodied by the building itself, which can be read as a reflection of the wider region, Safe Exit confronts us with a deeply uncomfortable reality.

Haunting Depiction

Cairo is a constant presence throughout Safe Exit. Without romanticising or dramatising the city, Hammad captures it in its natural state: vibrant yet mellow, chaotic yet mundane.

This understated approach extends to the film’s construction. In a deliberate attempt to almost ‘de-cinefy’ his work, Hammad allows the story to unfold at its own pace: there are no rapid cuts or elaborate camera movements; the camera remains largely still, occasionally shifting through subtle zooms. There is no cinematic score either. The only music we hear is deliberately played by the characters themselves, rather than through an imposed soundtrack.

Even dialogue is kept to a minimum, with Hammad allowing silences, awkward pauses and the mundane discomforts of everyday interactions to remain intact.

The actors are never afforded an extravagant on-screen presence. Samaan, the film’s central character, is not elevated into a conventional cinematic protagonist. There are no grand set pieces, no dramatic eruptions, no excessive performances or theatrical moments. Everything feels almost too quiet.

There is a subtle irony about that, given the screaming reality within which the film unfolds. The same material could easily have been approached through melodrama, heightened emotions and grand cinematic gestures.

But Hammad seems to understand that the world of Safe Exit is already triggering, heavy, condensed and melancholic enough. It doesn’t need further dramatisation. Allowing it to speak for itself is not merely an aesthetic choice; it is almost intrinsic to what the film is trying to communicate.

And perhaps that is where Hammad demonstrates his most profound understanding of the material: Samaan is not necessarily the film’s sole protagonist. Its ideas, its geography, its social contradictions and the realities inhabited by its characters are just as central.

This sensibility extends to the minimal script. Perhaps that is precisely why the film’s occasional standout moments feel particularly powerful: the restraint that governs the film leaves enough room for those specific moments, and everything Hammad wants to communicate through them, to resonate deeply. By resisting the temptation to constantly underline its ideas, the film allows the moments that matter most to carry an almost disproportionate emotional weight.

This is where Hammad’s central cinematic approach becomes most apparent: Safe Exit leans heavily towards cinéma vérité (a French documentary movement developed in the late 1950s and early 1960s, most closely associated with French filmmaker and anthropologist Jean Rouch and French sociologist Edgar Morin), an approach still relatively uncommon in Egyptian cinema. It embraces the rawness, spontaneity, grittiness and imperfections of lived experience rather than imposing conventional cinematic dramatisation upon it.

Ill at Ease

Although the film’s direction and production embrace the understated rawness discussed above, what Safe Exit has to say is neither subtle nor toned down. Its themes of alienation, isolation and brutal violence are anything but restrained.

Hammad pays particular attention to the mundanity of everyday labour through Samaan’s job as a security guard. His work requires him to sit for countless hours, doing virtually nothing but keeping himself company. He is mocked more than once throughout the film for the very nature of his job, and the prolonged, seemingly uneventful scenes of him sitting at his post are not exaggerated portrayals of boredom or isolation; they are precisely what the job looks and feels like.

This mundanity becomes an extension of Samaan’s alienation, which gradually seeps into his inner world, deepening his already introverted nature.

His alienation is intensified by his position as a religious minority and the trauma he carries from childhood. His fear becomes an inseparable part of his character, pushing him into solitude as he grows older. Through him, Hammad turns his attention to the place of minorities within the region, exploring the struggles, anxieties and quiet insecurities that many carry without necessarily expressing them openly.

Samaan doesn’t feel that he belongs to the society around him, nor does he feel that society recognises him as one of its own. This gradually pushes him into an identity crisis: he isn’t particularly religious, yet finds himself categorised and defined by a religious identity he doesn’t necessarily identify with. The question of who he is, and how much of that identity is imposed upon him by the world around him, becomes central to his character. The novel he spends his nights writing is titled Min Ana? (Who Am I?).

This sense of unbelonging in a vast city like Cairo, home to tens of millions of people from vastly different backgrounds and nationalities, is also explored through the film’s co-lead, Fatimah.

Through her, Hammad widens his focus beyond religious minorities to examine the position of women, particularly those from the most disadvantaged classes, whose struggles often concern the most basic necessities and rights of living.

Fatimah repeatedly mocks Samaan’s struggles: at the end of the day, he still has a place to stay and a job. He is, after all, a lower-middle-class man whose hardships pale in comparison to the misery of her circumstances. She has had to sleep with someone simply to secure a place to spend the night.

In doing so, she challenges the limits of his perspective and expands the film’s central question: what is the place of the weak and the vulnerable in this part of the world?

Evil Is Alarmingly Banal

There is something here that recalls Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil, which emerged from her coverage of the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the key Nazi officials involved in organising the deportation of Jews to extermination camps during the Holocaust.

In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, Arendt grappled with the unsettling ordinariness of a man implicated in extraordinary crimes.

Her observations challenged the assumption that immense evil must necessarily come from figures who appear monstrous, extraordinary or fundamentally different from everyone else. Sometimes, it takes shape through ordinary people, within familiar surroundings and the seemingly mundane routines of everyday life. Evil, in this sense, does not always announce itself. It can exist quietly, concealed behind an ordinary face, until the moment its consequences become impossible to ignore.

It is this unsettling proximity between the ordinary and the atrocious that Hammad explores through Abdullah. In drawing a connection between the kind of people capable of committing atrocities such as the 2015 massacre and the world immediately surrounding us, he suggests that those responsible do not necessarily look or behave any differently from everyone else.

Abdullah is the clearest embodiment of this. At first glance, there is nothing particularly striking about him. He looks like an ordinary citizen, someone who could easily go unnoticed in the crowd. Yet beneath this unremarkable exterior is a terrorist carrying a ready-to-use explosive belt.

Abdullah is never presented as a screaming, larger-than-life villain. He is frightening precisely because he doesn’t look like one. The danger he embodies is quiet, deeply dogmatic and capable of remaining hidden in plain sight, lurking behind the walls of an otherwise ordinary building in downtown Cairo, waiting to be unleashed.

Muhammad Hammad’s film leaves its viewers with questions that have no easy answers, and with an unsettling reflection of the harsh realities that produced these very questions. Yet there is something hopeful about the attempt itself: in the human impulse to make sense of all that one has witnessed through an honest and unflinching act of reflection.