When a man loses everything, he can take the path toward grace or the path toward perdition. It’s the latter that devours petty criminal Said Mahran (Shukri Sarhan) in Kamal El-Shaikh’s El less wal kilab (US: Chased by the Dogs) after a betrayal sends him to prison. Upon his release after four years, all of the bonds that defined his life have been torn asunder: friendship (it was a friend who fingered him to the police), marriage (his wife divorces him to marry the stool pigeon), and parenthood (unable to recognize him, his little daughter screams when Mahran attempts to hug her). While Mahran first attempts to take the high road, seeking support and counsel from old friends, his emotional pain instead soon finds an outlet in vengeance: committed to killing those who wronged him, he murders innocent bystanders instead, which sparks a police manhunt that drives the desperate Mahran to the open home and heart of prostitute Noor (Shadia). Mahran’s material and spiritual impoverishment, especially in contrast to the conspicuous wealth of the upper class, establishes a sense of doom that ultimately traps him in the desert with dogs chasing, bullets flying, and wounds bleeding out. Korayem’s cinematography satisfyingly experiments with Dutch angles, high angles, kaleidoscopic lenses, and shadows sculpted as cages in multiple scenes to represent Mahran’s increasingly chaotic worldview, which culminates in a dream sequence that foreshadows the downward momentum of his emotional crisis.