‘Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo’ is an endlessly atmospheric, gently suffocating journey through Cairo's underbelly.

Last year, Saudi director Ali Kalthami, described his directorial debut “Night Courier” to be part of “sigma cinema”, films about lone, emotionally closed male protagonists with repressed violent tendencies, navigating a merciless night, a lone wolf, a modern knight, films like “Drive”, “Taxi Driver”, and “Nightcrawler”.

You can place “Seeking Haven for Mr. Rambo” in a similar category, an endlessly atmospheric, gently suffocating journey through the streets of Cairo at night.

Essam Omar’s (the lead actor) performance even takes Ryan Gosling’s performance in “Drive” (complete with an iconic jacket of his own) and adds on top of it, minimizing the “cool” factor, emphasizing the boiling raging volcano inside him, and showing his “talks too little, doesn’t express himself” persona to be more of an act, a necessity of a young boy who suddenly found himself responsible for his old mother. It’s a brilliant performance that reveals its complexities more as the film goes on.

But, not to be reductive, the film is much more than a very authentically Egyptian riff on a western trope, it stands in a long line of Egyptian cinema, Hassan is just a more broken version of the city knights of Mohammed Khan’s cinema, and the pacing and style of the film is another one in a line of recent independent (and perhaps too slow and too European influenced) Egyptian cinema that "flourished" after the 2011 revolution (in films like “Weathered Green” or “Poisonous Roses”). But really, all of that is just dancing around the animal in the room, the film’s most unique and more interesting feature, the dog “Rambo”.

Rambo the dog, “played” by the Rambo twins, is the character the whole film revolves around, the beating heart giving the cold world of the film its warmth, tenderness, and literal and metaphorical blood. He is the character that general audiences will love and emotionally connect with the most, and that critics will pick apart for symbolic meaning the most, and there’s a lot to unpack and love in this guardian angel that you find yourself guarding back, the still innocent part of yourself you try to keep away from a vicious city. Perhaps we are all animals, but with protecting one we become the best animals, or perhaps more than animals.

Perhaps the dog, consciously or not, is a continuation of another popular genre, the man escorting a weaker person in the underbelly of an apocalyptic world, like “Logan”, “The Last of us” ,”Children of Men” or “God of War”, and while all the previous examples are “dad” character guiding a “offspring”, Hassan’s own longing of a parental figure who hast forsaken him enriches this beyond a simple father/son dynamic, as a fatherless child tries to give the parental protection that he lacks to another creature, a creature that (to mirror another recent Egyptian indie film) may be some sort of incarnation of said absent father, in animal form.