"Do not be afraid but beware"
If you enter the 8 West ward of the mental hospital, know that before you go in, you should remove your traditional thoughts about the mental illness, because you are here in front of people wearing their white angelic clothes, but in the dark part of their own world they have committed senseless crimes, People have them because of madness or a touch of the Devil as the Blue Elephant tells us.
The second part of the film "The Blue Elephant" opens to complete new episodes of the closed series in the first part, opening up new problems to us with previous instruments, the heroes, namely the protagonist, Dr. Yahya Rashed, who is watching him in the film. After an absence in a situation that confirms that his life is not going well, despite his marriage to his sweetheart "Lubna" and the formation of a family looks happy, this state of shroud reminds us of the first recognition of Yahya in the first part. The personality of Yahya evolves and is surrounded by strange fantasies and dreams, but it is still in his own bubble that the "villain" tries to penetrate.
In the same way, as in the first part, Yahya is called to Ward 8 West to see the case of a psychiatric patient who has just arrived at the hospital and then committed a heinous crime. Here we know that Yahya left the field of psychiatry for years and that his call was because the patient asked him by name After refusing to talk to anyone else, and this lure is the gate in which the hero will be involved in his journey with the patient "unique" secrets and mysteries.
The new characters in the related parts are always the odd party that the public does not feel safe in the cinema. We see the new appearance of Dr. Akram / Iyad Nassar, but he is just a figure who leads the hero to the world of the hospital and does not develop his role in the events significantly, in contrast, the new character "Farida / Hind Sabri" the main axis of the events and development of events. We know Yahya and trust him, but we do not know what that unique one carries, and as the trajectories of events fueled by excitement and terror fall into the trap of uncertainty and uncertainty, in all the encounters between Yahya and the psychopath we learn the scene from his own point, but we later discover that what we see with his help It is not true and unique that did not fly in the air and did not fall on the ground as we saw, and that Yahya is the one who attracted her from her white clothes and dropped her to the ground. Here the viewer is increasingly suspicious of the behavior of the hero who has become unreliable, to take a distance from him also to watch him and understand what is happening away from him ?
The character of Dr. Akram in the film "Blue Elephant 2"
"Do not trust an addict or psychopath"
In the scenes of the solitary confinement room in which there is a unique confrontation between her and Yahya, these scenes are dominated by "close shot" shots that bring us closer to faces. This proximity and scrutiny leaves us with frightening impressions of the characters and specifically unique that Hind Sabri has managed to embody all their contradictions Its features are between smile, frenzy, madness and evil. On the other hand, all that Yahya does is look at her and see her, which suggests throughout the film that it is important to do something to understand what is happening.
The Blue Elephant Pill is the magic tool that enables Yahya to travel through time and decipher the puzzle. With three pills, we will know everything and make sure that the "Sparrow" is looking for Yahya and looking for him. All the signs throughout the film tell us that the body Yehia is the new goal for Nayal to settle in, and Yahya since the beginning of the film is the first enemy of himself, not unique.
In one of the nightmares that attack him in his sleep, Yahya is chasing himself in a train carriage. In a long battle with himself, he ends up killing himself with a bloody fist. This nightmare reflects the mental and psychological state of the hero. What is the nature of its internal conflict? Is his life destroyed or he surrenders to reality? Many of the questions that we will not explain and will not help the rhythm of the film to reflect on the thinking of the answer, but we make sure that Yahya, away from the things of the jinn and sprites, suffers from a psychological problem with itself, and that the full vision will be clear in the last scene in the film.
Going back to the act of consideration and its relationship to the crisis of the hero, we will know later that the genie "Nael" the old enemy of life goes to a unique body of a very subjective and unpredictable, namely the mirror, which is of course being a woman, her daily ritual involves reading herself in the mirror, Her body is pierced through the mirror, that gate that reveals our souls and our bodies. By connecting us to the theory of the mirror and seeing Yahya in his dreams, the puzzle leads us to the final scene in which Yahya gets up and does not understand where he is? What is happening to him? Then he goes to the mirror to see himself, and then we know that his body is covered with a tattoo moving like the Ivy, to understand that Nael occupied his body, the end of the novel derived from the events of the first part of the film.
Surprised away from reality
Marwan Hamed, director of "The Blue Elephant"
The director of the film, Marwan Hamed, follows his own map of the treasure site and begins to draw the roads leading to it. Before he starts walking, he makes sure that all the light poles guide him to his right path. We can now simply ask, after Marwan Hamed gave his first long film "Yaqoubian Building" and then "Ibrahim Al Abyad", why did his map change? Why did he move away from realism to take the roads of excitement and imagination with the writer Ahmed Murad?
In an interview with him about the crystallization of the idea of turning the novel "Blue Elephant" into a feature film, Marwan says that Egyptian cinema needs to change blood to evolve and keep abreast of the technical and artistic developments witnessed by the world. The Blue Elephant is very attractive and has all the qualities that Marwan dreams of In a new creative way in which fresh features are created for his cinematic language, apart from the friendship that Ahmed Mourad brings together, Marwan's imagination is represented in three angles: "The success of the novel, the factor of surprise, the distance from reality." Cinema Marwan Hamid [1].
At the same time, Marwan announces that he was influenced by Alfred Hitchcock in thriller films and how he was able to create new vocabulary in this genre by employing footage sizes, sharp montage, employing silence to create suspense, and other cinematic elements. But did Marwan succeed in creating a state of artistic identification with Hitchcock's inspirational vocabulary?
In an interview with Medan , Dr. Hameen El-Tohamy, a screenwriter at the Higher Institute of Cinema in Cairo, on the thrill of Marwan Hamid's cinema and his influence on Hitchcock, there is no clear sign of this influence in Marwan Hamid's cinema. A master of the pieces and his angles in photography, here we can see him as a tribute to the director, and demonstrates the dominance of Hitchcock's influence on Brian De Palma's films as a clear example of this impact combined with Brian's full vision of his world. The same applies to Polish filmmaker Roman Polanski in "Troubled" Frantic) [2] or the French director François T. Revo in "The Bride Wears Mourning" (La mariée était en noir) [3].
Play the rhythm
Do not miss the memory of the audio viewer details of the sound bar in the film, and the music that calls inside us once they hear certain feelings. In her first appearance, "Farida / Hind Sabri" quietly follows her into her simple and frightening face at the same time, and her white clothes that look angelic but inhabited by demons, your feelings clash between madness and incompetence, between calm and the evasion of evil, In the first part, here, without words, we recall in our auditory memory what the music wants to tell us, that her disfigured body reverts the biography of "Sherif Kurdi" and that it completes His story and his situation, and that with all that it looks like a patent embodying the new danger that Yahya faced before. The music comes as a complement to the story and not just details to add to the dazzling dose. As Hisham Nazih (the composer of the film) emphasizes in a previous interview, he was asked to make music part of the film, which carries many complexities and multiple reactions to the actor in the same scene.
Psychological illness and black magic
Many people may not like the treatment of the film - and the novel - of cases of mental illness that win the popular folk tale insured with the black magic of the mental illness, but it is completely away from the area of receiving the film according to the view of industry, and choose to provide treatment away from reality and flying in the spaces of fiction aim here that It offers a kind of cinema that is absent from the Egyptian cinema, which is horror and suspense.
In the question " Meedan " by Dr. Hameen Al-Tohamy about his vision of the qualitative classification of the film "The Blue Elephant" he sees clearly belongs to the cinema of horror, but the problem lies in the source of this horror, the camel "Nael." Heiman explains that the dramatic construction of horror films depends on the existence of a monster that refers us to the sin of what the hero or any character in the drama world has done in one form or another. Here the beast acquires a trait that makes it more powerful than the main hero, Which happens in his own world, until the end of his discovery of the nature of this beast in full and which often addresses the conflict between a religious goal between the hero and the beast to the end that may or may not win the hero. What we saw in the first part of the film puts us in a state of uncertainty in front of "Na'il" who did not have a clear plan or possessed supernatural abilities. In contrast, Yahya had no religious problem making his encounter with the beast end up rethinking faith. The origin of the sin that causes the appearance of the jinn is the black magic performed by Deja / Sherine Reza. It ended in the first part of the film with a simple and semi-quiet end to Nael, and it ended easily was not successful.
The story in all its steps may not have facilitated the usual tracks of the world horror filmmakers, but the completion of the story in a second part removed the mystery of the source of the threat and horror of the hero's life. The focus was more on its goals and roots without the need to delve into the details of the hero world we know, Which was treated with caution and not dumping in the new part. But with the exciting ending of the film, the question arises: Will his industry work on a new treatment to complete the story in the third part puts us in front of a new portal of suspense and psychological horror? Is the audience excited about the unknown fate of the hero of the "Blue Elephant"? The filmmakers should think carefully before answering these questions, so as not to destroy one of the most popular films in the current era of the Egyptian film industry.