Complaint No. 713317

Yasser Shafiey’s feature debut Complaint No. 713317 takes a premise with the clean lines of a short and stretches it into an 80-minute pressure cooker, where the stretchiness is both the point and, at times, the problem. A retired couple in their sixties, Magdy (Mahmoud Hemeida) and Sama (Sherine), live a contained life in their Cairo apartment until their fridge stops cooling. What should be a straightforward service call turns into a months-long ordeal with a shady maintenance company, and the longer the appliance stays broken, the more everything else begins to rot around it.

The early scenes are sharply observed, and frequently funny. Shafiey understands how bureaucracy becomes theatre in the home. The pleading calls to customer support, the performative authority of technicians, the way “policy” is used like a weapon. The fridge isn’t just an object, it becomes a household third party, a neighbourly topic, a running public humiliation. People ask for updates on it the way you ask after a sick relative. The comedy lands because it is rooted in recognition, not punchlines. Even the voice on the phone (Enam Salousa) can feel like a full character, not because she’s seen, but because the system speaks through her.

What gives the story weight is the way the repair saga activates older wounds. Sama’s sense of status and usefulness has been quietly eroded, pushed aside by time and, pointedly, by younger replacements. Magdy’s identity is tied to being the one who fixes things, pays for things, keeps the household from slipping. The fridge’s failure becomes an insult to masculine pride and to the couple’s shared dignity.

But the script also risks leaning too hard on its own cleverness. Some bits, like the neighbour’s kids betting on and predicting their mother’s behaviour every time they’re on screen read like a device rather than a discovery, and the spiral can start to feel schematic, as if each new technician or excuse is a new rung on the same ladder. The Kafkaesque loop is the design, yet repetition is a dangerous fuel. You start to see how this might have been devastating as a tight short, a single escalating week, instead of a prolonged siege.

You can read the title’s palindromic number as more than a bureaucratic tag: 713317 is a figure that returns to itself, a loop you can’t exit. That mirror-structure fits a story built on circular time – call, wait, excuse, reschedule, repeat – where every promise of resolution only brings you back to the same starting point, just poorer, more tired, and more resentful. It also reflects the couple’s own internal stalemate. Magdy’s pride won’t let him admit he’s been conned, Sama’s bitterness won’t let her fully let go of what she lost, and the apartment becomes a hall of mirrors in which each tries to restore control by doubling down. In that sense, the palindrome isn’t a clever flourish; it’s the film’s shape. The complaint number reads like administration, but it behaves like fate; symmetrical, indifferent, and designed to keep ordinary people moving in place.

Still, the best insight is simple and stinging: the issue is never just the issue. “Right to repair” here is also the right not to be scammed, dismissed, infantilised, or drained by an invoicing arithmetic that no longer has any moral relationship to reality. In the end, the fridge is a proxy for everything the couple can’t restore, not their youth, not their social standing, not even the trust that a basic service will be delivered because someone promised it would. All that remains, finally, is the bleak comfort of an act that looks like agency, even when it costs more than it repairs.

Reviewed on: 05 Feb 2026