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You Will Die at Twenty Movie Review

You Will Die at Twenty is a 2019 Sudanese drama film directed by Amjad Abu Alala. It is a film that has a great premise, but the execution left a lot to be desired.

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“You ask for forgiveness for your sins

and yet you’ve never sinned. Try sinning“

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A mystic from a Sudanese village prophesizes that a newborn boy will die when he reaches the age of twenty. During his first years of adolescence, Muzamil grows up like other children, but sometimes feels uneasy about his future. As a teenager, he gets to know Suleiman, an outsider in the community, who has returned after spending years abroad. Suleiman owns a film projector and starts to show Muzamil movies in his house, thus introducing the young man to an unknown world. Upon turning twenty, he is looking at a bus that could take him away.

This movie deals with a lot of different themes. It depicts the prejudices and superstitions of a small village and just how harmful those can be to a young person during development. It also has that evident theme of not fitting in and wanting to escape the many confines of a small village. It depicts how suffocating living in a small area can be while it also shows the prospects of filmmaking and the magic of cinema.

All of these themes are great, but none of them were explored as potently as one would hope due to its incredibly slow pace and very weak characterization. For a film that is so firmly centered on its main character, you’d think that Muzamil will be superbly developed, but you’d be sorely mistaken. The two actors playing his teenager and older versions both failed to connect while the character himself too often felt very static. Plot happened to him instead of the other way around.

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Others were also forgettable with the female characters failing to connect as well. The only memorable personality was Suleiman as his development was the strongest and his arc was very interesting. But other than him, the movie left me cold unfortunately.

The immensely slow pace also prevented this intriguing story to make a stronger mark on this viewer. Yes, a couple of moments are dramatic and even elevated by some artistic editing and production choices, but more often than not the film is lacking ambition, it is repetitious and leisurely paced to an extreme.

You Will Die at Twenty is only the eighth feature film produced in Sudan since their independence in the fifties. The director, Amjad Abu Alala had to work on this film during the Sudanese Revolution, and it’s a small miracle that he made such a good-looking and sounding picture in the first place.

His directing is definitely solid and his grasp of his country of origin is also remarkable, but this was his debut feature and that showed, resulting in a film that way too often struggled to properly define either its protagonist or its numerous themes. The ending is very memorable as is the beginning, but the entire middle stretch was to me quite boring, lifeless and unremarkable.

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Small emotional moments notwithstanding, the movie failed to resonate, especially because of its lack of dialogue as it is too sparse for the majority of time. It’s no wonder why it appealed to many critics, but for me I need more of a dramatic and not just artistic approach at storytelling.