Across times and cultures, space has always been deeply implicated in ritual. Sacred spaces, profane spaces, spaces proscribed to all but a certain few, spaces of both natural and human construction: all are involved in the creation and performance of rituals. Muslims who circumambulate the Kaaba in Mecca are enacting a ritual that takes place both in a certain space (the Sacred Mosque) and around another, equally specific space (the Kaaba itself). Spaces that serve as the centerpieces for ritual can function as sites of powerful emotional attachment. When the bodies of Gamal Abdel Nasser and Umm Kulthum were carried aloft through the streets of Cairo after their deaths in 1970 and 1975, video footage of these funerals shows their coffins working as the focal points for rituals of mourning with striking visual echoes to the circumambulation of the Kaaba. The coffins themselves become uncanny spaces containing corpses reanimated to a sort of second life by the adoration of the crowds, their association with life stronger than that of the mourners who are trampled to death in the frenzy or commit suicide out of the intensity of their grief. In this presentation, I analyze visual representations of ritualized space in film, in particular space that is involved in rituals of mourning. Focusing primarily on the houseboat in Ḥusayn Kamāl’s 1971 film "Tharthara fawq al-Nīl" ("Chitchat on the Nile"), where a group of Egyptian men and women gather nightly to smoke hash and forget the disappointing realities of post-1967 Egyptian society, I propose that the director’s camerawork and the film’s repetitive staging of certain movements and lines of dialogue inscribe the houseboat within a 20th-century Arabic visual aesthetic of loss shaped around uncanny spaces that function as stages for the ritualized performance of melancholy. Defining melancholy in accordance with Freud and Judith Butler as a state in which true, cathartic mourning is inhibited by a refusal to accept the loss of what is gone, I argue that a careful examination of Kamāl’s film exposes the houseboat as an uncanny, always already liminal space where melancholy is ritually enacted by the houseboat's “gang of stoners” ("shillat al-masāṭīl") and the unbearable loss of the grand promises of Nasserist Egypt is endlessly deferred.