Hassan Mutlag Al-Maraiyeh

Most of what Hassan Mutlag Al-Maraiyeh does in Theeb (2014) he does at a murmur, a few feet from a boy, over sand. He is credited only as the Stranger, and the second half of Naji Abu Nowar's first feature belongs to the two of them in a way we will not describe. Theeb has every reason to fear him and no way to do without him. Al-Maraiyeh plays the man with neither menace nor charm, and the lack of both is what keeps the scenes tight: there is nothing in his face to tell the boy, or us, which way he will go.

He had never acted before. The facts of his life up to then are few: a nomadic childhood around Wadi Rum, where the film was shot, service in the Jordanian Army, a job inspecting trucks in Aqaba, and an open casting call that Abu Nowar followed with workshops before the cameras turned. It shows, and it helps. He moves through the desert like someone who has spent his life in it, and he does nothing an actor would think of doing to let us know he is acting.

We expected the film to turn on the boy, and it does, but the stretch we found hardest to sit through was the Stranger's, because Al-Maraiyeh will not let the man explain himself and we kept waiting for him to. Most critics have seen in the part a fierce exterior with gentleness underneath. We saw less than that and liked him more for it: not a hard man hiding a soft one, but a man doing what he has to and not much caring to be understood. The film is calmer for it, and more frightening.

Since then the credits are small and mostly short: a father in A Calling. From the Desert. To the Sea (2022), a Turkish commander in a short called Talqa, and work behind the camera in costume and production design. There is no second feature performance to set beside the first, so this is a view of one, with the usual warning: it may be the man, or it may be Abu Nowar and the desert. Until someone gives him another part of that weight, Theeb is the whole case, and it is a good one.