A Hologram for the King (2016)

Based on Dave Eggers's 2012 novel of the same name, A Hologram for the King is a mid-budget co-production spread across an unusually broad consortium of countries and studios, including Tom Hanks's own production company Playtone and the long-established German outfit X Filme Creative Pool. The film follows Alan Clay, an American businessman who travels to a vast, half-built economic city in Saudi Arabia to pitch a holographic teleconferencing system to the King himself, only to find that the King never seems to arrive, the Wi-Fi is unreliable, and a lump on his back is quietly demanding more attention than any of his professional problems. It is the kind of premise that could easily tip into broad farce, but the material, both the novel and the screenplay adapted from it, is more interested in the quiet unravelling of a certain kind of American confidence than in cheap laughs at anyone's expense. The film was released in 2016 to a politely mixed critical reception, the sort of response a film gets when it is doing something genuinely modest and reflective in a marketplace that mostly wants something louder.

The director is Tom Tykwer, the German filmmaker probably best known internationally for the breathless formal experiment of Run Lola Run. That earlier film was all kinetic energy and structural daring, which makes A Hologram for the King something of a deliberate gear-change: slow, sun-baked, and more concerned with silence than momentum. Tykwer co-wrote the screenplay, and the adaptation is fairly faithful to Eggers's wry, melancholy tone. The production filmed on location in Morocco standing in for Saudi Arabia, as well as in Germany and the United States, giving the film a genuinely displaced, slightly unreal visual quality that suits its themes rather well.

Tom Hanks carries the film almost entirely on his own, which is both its great strength and the thing that places the highest demands on your patience as a viewer. Hanks has spent enough of his career playing decent, slightly baffled men in over their heads that Alan Clay feels entirely natural to him, and there is real craft in how little he overplays the character's loneliness. Around him, the supporting cast is worth noting: Sarita Choudhury plays the doctor who becomes entangled with Alan in ways that complicate his already complicated situation, Sidse Babett Knudsen (familiar to many from the Danish political drama Borgen) appears as a fellow expatriate, and Ben Whishaw turns up briefly as a younger colleague whose own precariousness underscores Alan's. For those curious about Hanks in rather different modes from this one, it is worth knowing that the same year saw him appear in Inferno, a film operating at a very different temperature altogether.

A-Z World Movie Challenge Cayman Islands Alright, let’s unpack this one: A Hologram for the King, a film set in Saudi Arabia but somehow counting for the Cayman Islands. Okay, fine, I’ll play along. If a movie’s registered under Cayman Island tax law, does that make it a financial thriller? Either way, I’m not complaining (it’s got Tom Hanks, and that’s good enough for me.) So here’s the deal: Alan Clay (Hanks) is a middle-aged American salesman clinging to the last shreds of his dignity, peddling hologram tech to a Saudi king who may or may not show up. It’s a movie about frustration, regret, and a cyst on his back that’s so clearly a metaphor for his soul it might as well have a sign saying “LOOK AT ME, I’M HIS PAST MISTAKES.” Tom Hanks, doing Hanks things. He’s reliably understated, balancing melancholy and dry humor. Yusuf, the driver. This guy steals the show. His deadpan rants about Saudi bureaucracy and random detours into desert conspiracies (“Maybe we meet some insurgents … who knows?”) are pure joy. If this were a buddy comedy, he’d be the star. Visually the Saudi desert looks like a beige fever dream, endless highways, sterile hotels, and one suspiciously lush corporate campus that seems to exist in its own climate zone. There was some issues though. The “insurgency” subplot. At one point, Yusuf drags Alan to a desert hideout where they… do nothing? It’s like the scriptwriters thought, “Hey, let’s add some tension!” then forgot about it. Romance? Maybe? Alan’s flirty texts with a Danish lady who puts up with him constantly and awkwardly rejecting her advances. Then his (for KSA standards) completely illegal rendezvous with a Doctor. It feels rushed and unrealistic. This is a movie about disconnection, from purpose, from culture, from your own body (hence the cyst). Alan’s a man adrift, selling a future he doesn’t believe in while haunted by a past he can’t escape. The hologram tech is a metaphor! For globalization! For loneliness! I would recommend it. If you’re into slow-burn character studies with dry humor and existential dread, yes.

I keep coming back to that cyst, genuinely. It is such an on-the-nose piece of writing that it probably shouldn't work, and yet somehow it does, because Hanks plays it with exactly the right degree of weary acceptance rather than melodrama. The Yusuf scenes are the film's real pulse, and I think a sharper edit could have leaned into that odd-couple energy a bit more instead of wandering off into subplots that go nowhere particularly useful. It is the kind of film that sits with you in a low-key way for a day or two after watching, not because it has resolved anything, but because it has accurately described a feeling a lot of people have and rarely see reflected back at them on screen. Sometimes that is enough. Slow burn and slightly beige, but not without its moments.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2016  | Watched: 2025-06-05

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Trailer

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Tom Tykwer: Run Lola Run (1998)
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More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
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