At first this seems like familiar territory — gritty London ’hoods where immigrant sons get mixed up with drugs and gangs. Here’s the young, studious, nonstreetwise Mo (Fady Elsayed), who worships his criminal older brother Rash (James Floyd). Here’s Mo getting involved in a drug deal gone wrong. Here’s the deal rapidly going even more wrong.
Then, after a burst of violence leaves literal blood in the street, director Sally El Hosaini marks a subtle shift in tone. Rash begins to question his life, not all at once, but slowly, for reasons that aren’t clear at first even to him. By the time love and sexual identity come into play a bit later, it’s plain that the director is after something more than another group of fast-living, fast-dying urban thugs.
Unusually for this type of British indie, cinematographer David Raedeker decided to admit that London can have both color and sunlight and that its low-income areas can sometimes look downright pretty.
The boys’ Egyptian family and Muslim faith are shown as facts of their lives, not their entire identity. A brief love scene gives a whiff of the erotic, and the script even has flashes of dry humor.
The plot doesn’t entirely escape formula, and the ending is jagged and forced, unable to commit to either hope or gloom. But for at least part of its length, “My Brother the Devil” brings refreshing changes to a genre badly in need of them.