A superb feature debut from writer-director Sally El Hosaini, this is a film that looks at brotherly love and idolatry, family units, prejudice, and the difficulty of finding yourself becoming a very different person to the one who was living your life 24/7 for so many years.
Fady Elsayed is Mo, a young man who greatly admires his older brother, Rashid (James Krishna Floyd). Rashid is a core member of a gang, which means he also has a mortal enemy (Demon, played by Leemore Marrett Jr.), and that means that he is much more aware of the dangers around him than Mo, who seems so naïve and vulnerable that you can understand why his older brother is trying to keep him away from the gang life. One major incident changes everything for the brothers, and Mo grows more confused as he sees Rashid distance himself from his old life and start off on a new path that those around him may find much harder to accept.
Although it starts in a way that recalls so many other British movies from the past couple of decades, My Brother The Devil soon starts to show viewers that it aims to be a very different look at this particular aspect of British culture (and it is worth noting that the young lead characters are also sometimes trying to incorporate and/or process their Egyptian heritage as they figure out how they want to define their lives). El Hosaini has clearly written about something that she can at least partially identify with, being of British Egyptian parentage herself, and having spent the first few years of her life in Cairo, and she gives her film a clear identity, ironic when you think of the main characters being so unsure of how they want to identify. The writing and direction here give no hint of someone working on their first feature, I can only guess that El Hosaini really honed her craft in her first couple of shorts, which I need to remember to check out at some point.
Both Elsayed and Floyd are fantastic in their roles, natural and believable as brothers. Floyd is clearly the more capable of the two, but he spends a lot of the runtime trying to get his bearings as circumstances around him force him into some surprising and profound self-realisations. Anthony Welsh does great work in his small, but pivotal, role, as does Saïd Taghmaoui, and Elarica Johnson deserves to be singled out for making her character, Vanessa, a standout from the few female characters who get some screentime.
A film about love, while having almost every scene pulsating with an undercurrent of violence and danger, My Brother The Devil is powerful stuff that takes viewers from despair to sweet jubilation. It is El Hosaini’s only feature, to date, and I really hope we get something else from her soon.
8/10
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