Hele Vejen (2025)
Directed by Jahfar Muataz
Screenplay by Muataz & Babak Vakili
Starring Afshin Firouzi, Albert Arthur Amiryan, Mohammad Dhia-Aldin, & Tarek Zayat.

Crime / Thriller

★★★★ (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains
SPOILERS!
You’ve been warned.

Jahfar Muataz’s Hele Vejen is a Danish crime-thriller that follows Cairo (Afshin Firouzi), a former criminal who now works on getting young people out of their own criminal lives and transitioning them into a better existence. He still lives in Nørrebro, Copenhagen, the same district as Saddam (Albert Arthur Amiryan), his old friend and fellow criminal. While Cairo works to change lives for the better, Saddam is a big time drug dealer. The two men aren’t exactly friends anymore after an incident in their past pulled them apart. Yet they have to work together when Cairo’s nephew Hamza (Tarek Zayat) goes missing. The search for Hamza will soon potentially drive Saddam and Cairo further apart, as Cairo’s prepared to burn Copenhagen’s underworld to the ground to find his nephew.

On the surface, Hele Vejen is a familiar crime story about two men who’ve been friends/accomplices since they were younger men but are now on divergent paths when they find themselves forced back together due to a tense situation that eventually changes them both irreparably. Muataz’s film is really all about what lines people are willing to cross for the people they love and how much thicker blood is than any other substance in the known universe. Hele Vejen may feel familiar, though it’s a tough, emotional, and dark story that looks at the past’s repercussions in an individual’s present life since Cairo must not only face what was done to him and his family, he must also face the things he’s done and how they’ve affected other peoples’ families, too.
Hele Vejen can be read as a dark contemporary Greek tragedy, like the story positions Saddam as Caesar and Cairo as Brutus. Caesar and Brutus isn’t a fitting, specific analogy, but the film doesn’t have to be read directly with any one specific Greek myth. The film’s tale is a tragic story about two friends whose lives go in different directions until they’re forever torn apart by murderous betrayal. Just as Helen Vejen feels like an echo of Greek myth, it’s also a tale of echoes from personal pasts. Cairo and Saddam’s adult relationship is permanently strained by the earlier death of Cairo’s brother, Amir. They’re both also haunted by what their criminal activity has done to the community, specifically to one family that becomes important later in the film. The past comes back to haunt everybody, though nobody more so than Cairo. In this sense, Hele Vejen is a Gothic crime story that deals heavily with how criminals must inevitably confront their past sins.

What’s maybe most interesting about Hele Vejen is there’s no attempt to make anybody, Cairo included, look morally superior compared to anybody else. The racists from Vestegnen hate the Arab gangs, calling them apes and even trying to murder them. Saddam himself is wildly and violently heteronormative, calling other men “little whore” or “little pussy” and even yelling things like “I‘ll fuck you” at them, not to mention he’s hurting his own people by bringing drugs into the neighbourhood. Cairo himself, despite trying to live a better life, proves no better than anybody else, given what he does to Saddam. A pivotal character tells Cairo: “You and your friend Saddam are like cancer cells in my body. You poison the youth, the parents . . .” Nobody in Hele Vejen is better than anybody else; there’s no moral high ground or perceived superiority like there so often is in stories about criminals, there’s no positioning Cairo above Saddam ultimately in order to try justifying what he does to his former friend. This is a film about bad things done by bad people and how those things affect everybody around them. Muataz tells a story about endless cycles of violence, as the film’s ending illustrates how a new cycle of violence is only just beginning for Cairo, poised to do who knows what type of new damage to his life and his loved ones.