Gamal El-Hareem

When this year started out, we bet you never thought it’d turn out to be the year of Egyptian TV discovering the mystery-supernatural genre but here we are anyway! Yes, there’s another such show and it’s not, well, Paranormal.

You know what show it is, too — Gamal El-Hareem has been making the rounds everywhere online and, now that we’ve seen its first 5 episodes, we cannot wait to tell you all about it!

warning: probably contains spoilers

Plot

Okay, so this show starts off in a very mid-2000’s American horror movie fashion. Everything is sunshine-bright and happy as two of the main characters, Noor (Noor) and Hanan (Dina Fouad) get through their days, one at work and one visiting a jinn exorcist, before their last Ramadan iftar.

As you can tell, there’s something fishy going on with both women. Hanan believes she’s possessed and is seeing bugs and all kinds of weird stuff everywhere, while Noor keeps having dreams of a man dying in a different era.

But that’s not all. Throughout the pilot, Noor is in a constant state of apprehension and is almost attacked by a snake and witnesses her sister’s death after childbirth, which later on makes her unable to bond with her nephew.

Struggling still, Noor tries to save her friend Hanan from getting conned by the exorcist while she embraces her dreams wherein she’s Sheikh Hassan’s (Salah Abdallah) granddaughter, who’s sought by Selim (Eslam Gamal) a drunkard who joins the jinn-summoning circle antagonizing the Sheikh.

As this all goes on while the subplots of Moseiry and Eyad, Noor’s cousins, working together on a gallery, Youssef (the main love interest, Khaled Selim) avoids his rich family, and Noor’s maid Om Yasmine deals with her neighbor’s son kicking his family out of their home.

Characters

With a whole cast of characters, it’d be a bit ridiculous to try to get into all of their traits, especially since we’re not sure where some of them fall yet.

However, we only know a handful. First, we have Noor, a radio show host who’s in love with the arts and is a firm believer in science (as all leads are in these shows).

As the show goes on, though, we start to see Noor deal head-to-head with the supernatural in the form of visions, her possibly possessed friend, and a curse — still struggling to let herself fully believe what she’s seeing.

On the other hand, we have Hanan and Eyad, two characters who firmly believe in the supernatural with Eyad mentioning spirituality and jinns every five seconds, believing that Noor’s dreams are a key to something more, and Hanan believing she’s possessed and willing to sell everything she owns to get exorcised.

Naturally, that leaves us with Youssef, whose role we’re still unsure of, though we know him and his family history of being horrible and rich and power-hungry will come into play sooner than later.

Issues and Our Thoughts So Far

Here’s the thing about supernatural shows. If you have a prompt, it has to be interesting and it has to be that literally from the get-go. The premise of something uncanny and odd has to be gripping…it should NOT take a show like this three episodes to get interesting.

That’s one thing. Another is that the voiceover technique, employed only once, should be either a thing that sticks around or not there at all because seesawing like this doesn’t make sense. And, for your sake and ours, we won’t get into how…interesting the CGI was.

As for the acting and the characters themselves, we think there’s definitely more to come because, as you’ve already seen, the story’s a slow-burner.

However, despite its issues, Gamal El-Hareem remains an interesting experience in the supernatural genre that’s deeply needed, considering much Egyptian folklore relies on that alone.

What do you think? Are we taking an interesting deep-dive or milking the supernatural cow?