The Definitive Guide to Living in the Capital , Cairo , Egypt

‘You can’t keep out what’s already inside’, reads the poster for horror flick, Within. But let’s just begin with a lesson we’ve learned the hard way over the years. Within – also known as Crawlspace – was first released back in October 2016; when a film arrives in Egypt months after its original release, we’ve come to learn not to expect much – and it’s a lesson that rings oh so true with this particularly poor excuse of a horror.

Starring Michael Vartan of Alias and not-very-many-facial-expressions fame, the film’s premise is as hackneyed as it gets. A slightly dysfunctional family moves into a grand new house, only to find that their new home is already occupied by another presence. Just when you thought things couldn’t get more clichéd, said presence first contacts the youngest member of the household. The characters, generally, are all of the stock variety – a rebellious teenage daughter who develops a more intimate relationship with the presence, an exasperated step-mother who wants to play happy family and a clueless father who has no idea how to handle his daughter are all in the mix, as well as a suspiciously creepy neighbour who offers insight into the house’s history.

While strong female characters has been something of a go-to for contemporary horrors, it loses all effect here because the male characters are almost caricatures that are too one-dimensional for even this kind of film – and there is, of course, a string of questionable-to-absurd decisions made by the characters that’ll have you tearing out your hair.

Let’s, for a second, forget about the question of originality – this kind of haunted house thriller has been done to death and will continue to be dressed in various skins, so to speak, but it’s been done so much better in the recent past, that there’s very little going for Within. There are no surprises, no deviation from the copy-paste process.

In fairness, the film ups the ante to an interesting conclusion and if jump scares are your thing, you’ll find some here, but you’ll invariably leave the cinema with little to chew on, talk about or even remember.