An Egypt Affair (2024) Movie Review: Agatha-Christie-lite on a tight budget; convoluted and derivate

Marlin Darrah’s ‘An Egypt Affair’ is the next film in a long production line that has taken the director to many different countries. While watching the film, you can gauge that his intention is to take you to these places with him. However, the filmmaker in him does not understand what makes these stories about vacations gone wrong really click. What we have here is a film that is so lazily patched together that you can see through all the glitter and understand that even the actors are doing it because they are getting a free ticket.

The film is about Dylan Fontaine (Jarred Harper), one of those wealthy studs who feels like they never left their father’s basement after graduation. Dylan has such a dreary personality that, in spite of the filmmaker’s best intentions, you never care for him. He is married to Alexa (Stacey Marie Williams), who is trying to rekindle their rocky marriage by taking a trip to Egypt.

They are joined on their second honeymoon by close friends Jake (Nick Dreselly Thomas) and Amber (Lesley Grant) – another set of uninteresting side characters that give zero weight to the overall proceedings or the central mystery. Captain Amaros (Alfonso DiLuca) oversees the cruise. Other than checking if his guests enjoyed their ‘culturally appropriate breakfast’ or asking Dylan to help him find some treasure in this enchanting land, he serves no purpose whatsoever. However, the real conflict kicks in when Darius (Massi Furlan) and Safiya (Yolanthe Cabau) join the couple of couples on this vacation on the Nile.

A still An Egypt Affair (2024). — A Still *An Egypt Affair* (2024).

There is an unsaid air of seduction that traverses between Safiya and Dylan as they stop to look at the many beautiful places that come on the way of their steamboat cruise. These moments are genuinely sexy as Marlin Darrah uses Yolanthe Cabau’s beauty to capture a possible erotic diversion that the film will take. However, the spell is soon broken with predictable turns that these characters take, rendered even more odd and flat by just how poorly their arcs are written or how bad the actors are at playing them. There are sudden departures from one moment to the other as if the film is taking time jumps, in spite of us being on the boat all this while.

The more these characters open up, the more the plot becomes convoluted. I mean, anyone who checks into the film can see that it derives its central conceit from Agatha Christie’s ‘Death on the Nile,’ but it never does anything particularly interesting with the design it creates for itself. There is also a half-hearted emotional connection that Darrah tries to establish between the viewers and Safiya’s character, but even a casual viewer like me feels betrayed when she is sometimes referred to as Safiya and sometimes as Sofia. I mean, this is such a straightforward mistake that could have been corrected in post, but when laziness seeps into filmmaking, nothing can help.