A Hologram for the King (2016)

Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way first: A Hologram for the King is, according to my A-Z World Movie Challenge, a Cayman Islands film. Set in Saudi Arabia. Starring an American. Directed by a German. If a film gets registered under Cayman Island tax law, does that technically make it a financial thriller? I'm choosing to accept the absurdity and move on, because honestly, it's got Tom Hanks in it, and that's good enough for me.

The setup is deceptively simple. Alan Clay is a middle-aged American salesman dispatched to Saudi Arabia to pitch hologram conferencing technology to a king who may or may not ever deign to show up. He's behind on his mortgage. His marriage is done. His daughter's tuition looms over him like a storm cloud. And he's got a cyst on his back that is so transparently a metaphor for everything rotting inside him that it might as well arrive onscreen with its own title card reading "LOOK AT ME, I'M HIS PAST MISTAKES." The film does not shy away from its symbolism. Whether that reads as rich or heavy-handed probably depends on your patience for slow-burn existential dread dressed up in linen shirts.

Hanks is, as ever, quietly excellent. He doesn't push. He lets Alan's quiet desperation seep out through small gestures and long silences, finding the dry humour in a man who knows he's probably already lost but hasn't quite worked out how to stop trying. It's the kind of understated work that gets overlooked because it doesn't announce itself. But the real scene-stealer is Yusuf, Alan's driver, whose deadpan observations about Saudi bureaucracy and cheerfully ominous asides ("Maybe we meet some insurgents… who knows?") are an absolute joy every time he appears. In a different film, this character is the lead. Here, he functions as Alan's unlikely anchor to the world outside his own head, and their odd-couple dynamic gives the film most of its warmth.

Visually, the whole thing has a strange, washed-out beauty to it. The Saudi desert stretches out like a beige fever dream, all endless highways and sterile hotel corridors, punctuated by a suspiciously lush corporate campus that seems to exist in its own private climate zone. There's something almost comic about that contrast, this gleaming futuristic bubble plopped in the middle of nowhere, waiting for a king, while Alan and his small team sweat through another empty morning wondering if today's the day anyone shows up.

Where it stumbles is in the subplots that don't quite follow through. There's a desert detour with Yusuf that seems to be building toward something, then just… isn't. The film floats the idea of tension and abandons it. The romantic threads are similarly uneven. Alan's tentative connection with a doctor he meets feels rushed, and the texting back-and-forth with another woman in his orbit never quite lands the emotional weight it's reaching for. These feel like elements from a more crowded adaptation that got trimmed without being properly resolved.

But here's the thing: the film knows what it's actually about, and it commits to it. Alan Clay is a man adrift from his own purpose, from the culture around him, from his body (hence the cyst, bless it). The hologram technology he's selling is a product nobody is sure they need yet, pitched to a buyer who might never come, in a country that operates by rules he doesn't understand. It's a film about disconnection, about selling a future you don't believe in while haunted by a past you can't escape. Funnily enough, the Saudi setting reminded me of Werner Herzog's extraordinary Lessons of Darkness, which turns that same landscape into something almost otherworldly. The films couldn't be more different in tone, but both treat the desert as a place that strips things back to the essential.

A Hologram for the King won't be for everyone. If you want plot momentum and tidy resolutions, look elsewhere. But if you're in the mood for a slow, sun-baked character study with dry wit, a genuinely lovely central performance, and just enough existential dread to make you feel something, it earns its keep. Flawed in places, but quietly affecting in the ways that matter.

Three and a half stars.

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

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: MGM Plus Amazon Channel
Rent: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
Stream: Lionsgate+ Amazon Channel
Rent: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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