Movie Spotlight: Evil Orders

Yousef is not, in Essaf Amary’s telling, a bad man. He is a man who made bad choices and then found himself living inside the consequences. He forges documents. He flees Egypt with debt he can’t pay and no legal papers. He travels toward Australia not because he has a plan but because he has nowhere else to go. “I want to make a story of a man who is victim of his life,” Amary says, “who starts putting some toppings like the forger part forward by escaping from country to another to just find a better life.”

Amary wrote, directed, and stars as Yousef in Evil Orders, an Arabic-language international drama that asks whether a person who has spent years breaking rules can ever genuinely choose to stop. The answer, in this film, depends entirely on whether the world gives him the chance.

The part of him that wants out

Yousef meets Mariam and something shifts. He decides to change. He genuinely means it. “He had a good part inside,” Amary says. “Once he met Mariam and decided to be changed to a better person but unfortunately again he had no luck in that.” The film is interested in what happens to good intentions when the environment refuses to let them take root. Yousef’s redemptive moment isn’t denied by his character. It’s denied by circumstance.

What the title means

Evil Orders describes a moral trap. As Amary explains it: “Even if you choose the right and best way of your life, it was too late as the orders started to come from the evil people.” The phrase captures the film’s central tension. Yousef doesn’t want to participate in violence. He doesn’t agree with what’s being asked of him. But the orders arrive regardless, and by the time they do, the exit he was building for himself has closed.

Playing the character you directed

Amary has worked as actor-director before on short films, but Evil Orders was a different scale. “This film was a different stage to me as it’s a feature film and needs a lot of effort than my other short films.” He built a team around him and divided responsibilities carefully. The challenge of inhabiting a character while also making every creative decision about that character from the outside is something that shapes the whole texture of the performance.

What to know before you press play

Evil Orders blends genres without much signposting. Romance arrives early. So do consequences. The film runs through love, survival, and moral compromise in the same sustained breath, and Amary describes it plainly: “If you want to see drama, love, suspense and action” this is the film. It’s a refugee story told from the inside, in Arabic, by the man who also plays the refugee.

Drama

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Streaming now on Relay.