Critics reviews

Sitting through "Clash" is largely a miserable experience, and that's deliberate... Devotion to dogma and sheer perversity erodes their fellowship as day turns into night — after which "Clash" turns into a full-fledged horror movie, albeit one without the fake comfort of a supernatural or science-fiction pretext. It's just man's inhumanity to man, in full sway.

The action is absolutely riveting. There are a few lulls to vary the pace and to allow the prisoners to deal with their wounds and try to work out a strategy to protect themselves, but otherwise the suspense is maintained at a high level. A climactic scene in which rioters attack the truck, flashing laser pointers into it and trying to tip it over is handled, as Variety‘s review put it, with "brilliantly choreographed pandemonium.

Easily the best film I saw at Cairo, Clash makes good on a nifty premise: Tell the story of the 2013 post-coup protests from the inside of an overcrowded police van. It's to Diab's great benefit that this obstruction, modeled after Hitchcock's Lifeboat, hardly ever calls attention to itself.

The digital palette may be hideously washed-out, but the spectacle is nonetheless impressive, which is itself a problem: is it helpful, either cathartically or analytically, to stage bloody recent history as a technically skilful exercise? Given the film's success in Egypt, it seems it may at least be the former, but that sense of reliving recent trauma in order to exorcise it doesn't necessarily translate, especially when the framework is so repetitively schematic.