Any claim of a new horror prodigy must inevitably stand comparison with the successes of recent memory. That increasingly crowded field stretches from the early work of Ari Aster, through Hereditary and Midsommar, to more classically Hollywood efforts like A Quiet Place. It is against that backdrop that Curry Barker’s Obsession arrives carrying the weight of extraordinary praise, much of it intertwined with the story of its creator, a YouTuber who managed to bypass the traditional gatekeepers of the industry. Since premiering at TIFF (Toronto International Film Festival) in September 2025, the praise surrounding Obsession has had nearly nine months to ferment into something approaching mythology before the film’s commercial release. There is something undeniably impressive about a filmmaker nine months younger than me securing a theatrical release in an era where many of our peers seem locked out of the profession unless born into it. Yet the achievement of making a film and the achievement of making one of the best horror films in recent memory are not the same thing.

The premise is simple. Baron, known as Bear (Michael Johnston), harbors feelings for Nikki (Inde Navarrette) that appear largely unrequited. After acquiring a “one wish willow”, a twig that grants a wish when snapped, he makes a decision he quickly comes to regret. The mechanics of the supernatural device bear a striking resemblance to the occult logic found in Zach Cregger’s Weapons, where the snapping of a twig similarly bends reality to human desire. The comparison is difficult to ignore, though Barker proves capable of generating tension through means that are distinctly his own.

Indeed, the strongest aspect of Obsession is Barker’s command of atmosphere. Light and shadow are manipulated with confidence, imbuing ordinary spaces with a creeping sense of dread. The film repeatedly demonstrates a promising visual intelligence, finding unsettling possibilities in corners, hallways, and darkness rather than relying exclusively on loud shocks, though Barker is hardly shy about traditional jump scares. It is easy to understand why he has attracted attention. The talent is evident.

The problems emerge once the premise begins unfolding. Nikki increasingly ceases to exist as a person and instead becomes a manifestation of Bear’s wish. The film pushes this idea to disturbing extremes. When Bear leaves for work, Nikki remains rooted to the exact spot where he left her, unable to function in his absence. She stands there for hours and eventually days, urinating and defecating on herself as her obsession consumes every trace of independent thought. Navarrette commits fully to the role and sells the horror of the situation, but the film’s treatment of her character raises uncomfortable questions. Whether Barker intends this as a critique of possessiveness or merely as a vehicle for body horror is ultimately beside the point. The question is whether the resulting image offers any insight commensurate with the degree to which Nikki is reduced to an object through which Bear’s desires and regrets are explored. I am not convinced that it does.

Another curious detail emerges in the film’s depiction of adolescence. College looms over the story as a source of anxiety, with Sarah (Megan Lawless), a friend of the couple, receiving rejection after rejection through paper letters. It is a small point, but a revealing one. For a film so immersed in the sensibilities of Gen Z, it occasionally feels oddly detached from the realities of that generation. Most contemporary applicants experience the emotional rollercoaster of admissions through online portals, email notifications, and digital dashboards rather than envelopes arriving in the mail. The choice may seem insignificant, yet it contributes to a broader sense that Obsession is often more interested in an idea of youth than in the texture of young people’s actual lives.

What follows remains faithful to the conventions of its genre. Bear attempts to undo forces that have escaped his control, discovering that the rules governing the universe are far easier to invoke than to reverse. Barker stages these developments with technical assurance, and there are moments where the film’s craft carries it forward even when the story threatens to stall. Yet for all its competence, Obsession rarely feels as though it is challenging the audience’s assumptions or probing anything particularly uncomfortable beneath its premise.

Part of the enthusiasm surrounding the film appears rooted in what it represents. Coming as another even younger YouTube creator, Kane Parsons, makes the leap to theatrical filmmaking with Backrooms, Obsession has been folded into a broader narrative about internet creators reshaping cinema. That narrative is undeniably compelling. The film itself is less so. Neither work seems especially interested in confronting the collective anxieties of the present moment. Instead, they package those anxieties into accessible, respectable genre entertainment.

In the end, what lingers most is not the film’s central relationship but the comparison it invites. Where Weapons transformed a snapped twig into an unsettling symbol of power and control, Obsession reduces a similar supernatural conceit to the frustrations of a lovesick young man. Aunt Gladys snapping twigs and bending people to her will proved far more memorable than another straight Gen Z protagonist pining after a girl. The mythology surrounding Barker’s rise may well be justified. After all, the talent is evident. The mythology surrounding Obsession, however, appears to have grown far faster than the film itself.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫

It is a fact that every edition of the Cannes Film Festival is remembered in its own way. This year’s edition will stand out not because of a particular film or the discovery of a brilliant debut director, but because of what Cannes lacked: films from the major American studios. Perhaps this is a useful reminder that Hollywood is not the birthplace of the seventh art and that, as we learned in elementary school, “in the house of the Lumière brothers [in Paris] there was [the first] film premiere” and that “in that distant ’95, art received its seventh child,” meaning 1895.

Presenting the festival’s selection in April, Thierry Frémaux, its director and leading figure, concluded by stressing that “when [American] studios are less present at Cannes, then they are simply less present, full stop.” Yet while Frémaux may be able to tolerate the absence of American studios, the same cannot be said of America itself and its filmmakers. And so Paper Tiger by James Gray and The Man I Love by Ira Sachs, films that will at best leave viewers indifferent and then drown themselves in the monotony of Netflix recommendations, found their way into the main Competition.

With Hollywood in a crisis approaching the scale of the Great Recession, and with the imminent merger of two major studios, Warner Brothers and Paramount, the decisions of Los Angeles executives are increasingly shaped by the astronomical costs of a Cannes premiere and the unsatisfactory return on such investments. Film critics on the French Riviera have in the past been able to pass judgment on a film months before its theatrical release and seriously damage its box office prospects. Studios are therefore relying more and more on their own marketing campaigns and world premieres where they can impose review embargoes on critics, at least during a film’s first week of release.

The geographical monotony of the main Competition was also striking. Western Europe, the United States, and East Asia held a monopoly at the expense of Africa and South America, two of the world’s historically richest and most diverse continents. It is clear that Frémaux is one of the kingmakers of world cinema, part of a guard that gives priority in the main Competition precisely to those who return to Cannes every few years: the festival darlings. And it is impossible not to notice that these legends arrived on the Croisette in 2026 with, at best, mediocre and forgettable films, from Mungiu’s Fjord, winner of the Palme d’Or, to Zvyagintsev’s Minotaur, winner of the Grand Prix, and Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden. Those who appeared in the Cannes lineup for the first time, though not with debut films, generally managed to do so thanks to the subsidies and quotas Cannes unofficially preserves for nurturing French cinema.

In the past, the Cannes main Competition gave opportunities to first features and launched the careers of Mati Diop, Jane Campion, Steven Soderbergh and others. The last of these is not the best example, since he returned this year with a documentary about John Lennon in which he controversially used artificial intelligence. But Cannes is merely keeping pace with a broader 21st-century trend. While the previous century saw major cinematic achievements from the young, such as Orson Welles, who directed and co-wrote Citizen Kane at 25, and Jean-Luc Godard, whose Breathless was made when he was 29, this century more and more often endures films by the middle-aged and those in the late stages of creative life. These are undeniably accomplished greats, but also auteurs who appear tired, both in life and in creativity, as well as those who started young and now have nothing left to say without repeating themselves. Partly because of comfortable Western lives and freedoms, partly because of fame.

On the other hand, Hollywood places young YouTubers in directors’ chairs, proving that having an idea and realizing it cinematically are not necessarily abilities that go hand in hand.

Even the festival’s parallel sections, those historically born out of protest against the official selections and whose purpose is to provide a platform for new voices, recognized the already recognized this year. In Critics’ Week, director Sara Ishaq appeared with The Station. Ishaq was nominated for an Oscar in 2014 for her short film Karama Has No Walls. Also present was Kosovar director Blerta Basholli with Dua, after her first feature Hive swept almost all the major awards at the Sundance Film Festival in 2021. In Directors’ Fortnight, Reed Van Dyk, Oscar winner for the short film DeKalb Elementary, appeared with his first feature, Atonement.

A ray of hope remained in Un Certain Regard, a section known for unconventional and unusual styles of filmmaking. It was also the most geographically diverse program, ranging from the first Chilean film at Cannes, The Meltdown, to the only Palestinian film, Yesterday the Eye Didn’t Sleep. Incidentally, this was also the section in which this critic saw the fewest films, four out of a total of 19.

And just like that 79th Cannes Film Festival is over. Next year it enters its eighth decade, and the question now is how long a cinematic empire can continue to live off its own aura. Cannes will most likely reach its centenary, but whether it will celebrate it with the same prestige it currently enjoys is another story entirely.

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland opens in 1949 with a return that turns homecoming into trespassing. Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) – Nobel laureate, perhaps the most internationally renowned German writer of the twentieth century and one of Nazism’s fiercest cultural opponents – arrives back in Germany after years of exile in Switzerland and the United States. Accompanied by his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), Mann travels through a nation now partitioned between the Allied West and Soviet East, where both sides seek to claim him as a symbol of the “real” Germany.

One of the first lines comes during a phone call between Erika and her brother Klaus Mann (August Diehl), who bitterly remarks that German is “a language created to lie in.” The line immediately establishes Fatherland’s preoccupation with a culture and language morally contaminated by fascism, but also introduces a deeper familial contradiction. Klaus’s disdain toward the German language hangs uneasily over a film centered on his father, a writer whose global stature and moral authority were built precisely through German literature. Though Klaus remains largely offscreen, his presence lingers throughout Fatherland like a ghostly counterpoint to Thomas Mann’s lingering belief that some version of Germany – cultural, literary or moral – can still be salvaged.

Hanns Zischler plays Thomas Mann with an imposing gravitas that never hardens into sanctimony. Pawlikowski’s Mann is intellectually unyielding yet visibly exhausted, a man returning to a language and culture he still belongs to but no longer fully recognizes. Though now an American citizen, he remains irreducibly a German writer. That contradiction sits at the center of Fatherland, a compact but remarkably dense chamber piece about exile, memory and the moral ruins of a nation attempting to culturally reconstruct itself after catastrophe.

Equally compelling is Sandra Hüller as Erika Mann, continuing a remarkable streak of radically varied performances in recent years. Pawlikowski smartly refuses to reduce Erika to the role of dutiful daughter. She is at once caretaker, journalist, assistant and, in the film’s many travel sequences, effectively her father’s chauffeur as they move through a divided Germany thick with checkpoints and political suspicion. Hüller navigates these shifting roles masterfully, bringing a restless intelligence and emotional alertness to Erika that prevents the film from calcifying into a purely intellectual exercise. Through her, Fatherland gains much of its movement and nervous energy.

Beginning in Frankfurt, crowded with occupying Americans, informants and lingering wartime opportunists, Manns prepare to head for Weimar, in the Soviet-controlled East, to receive the Goethe Prize. Goethe becomes an almost spectral presence throughout: an emblem of a “good Germany” untouched by fascism, a cultural inheritance Mann desperately wants to believe can still exist. Pawlikowski avoids turning these debates into dry intellectual exercises. Instead, they emerge through tense encounters, conversations in hotel lobbies and uneasy reunions with figures who accommodated, enabled or simply survived the Nazi era.

One of the sharpest sequences sees Mann openly confront members of the Wagner family connected to the Bayreuth Festival, condemning not merely their proximity to Nazism but the ease with which Germany’s cultural elite now attempt to reintegrate themselves into polite society. Elsewhere, references to Erika Mann’s former husband Gustaf Gründgens – whose relationship with the Nazi regime remains heavily debated – and to her then-husband W. H. Auden deepen the film’s fixation on exile and compromised identities. Fatherland assumes a degree of historical literacy from its audience, but the references rarely feel ornamental; they reveal the dense web of artistic, political and moral entanglements that defined postwar Europe.

To call Fatherland a road movie would be misleading. Pawlikowski drains the genre of its liberatory impulse. Movement through postwar Germany is defined by checkpoints, surveillance and ideological scrutiny, every crossing carrying the tension of political negotiation. Even conversations feel monitored by history itself. The Germany Mann travels through is fractured geographically, morally and linguistically.

Visually, Fatherland continues Pawlikowski’s fruitful collaboration with cinematographer Łukasz Żal following Cold War. Żal’s black-and-white cinematography lends the film a severe elegance without tipping into nostalgia. The monochrome imagery emphasizes a country suspended between past and future, unable to fully bury one and uncertain how to construct the other.

Unlike many Cannes Competition titles eager to advertise their formal ambition, Fatherland finds confidence in precision and restraint. At just 82 minutes, Pawlikowski’s film wastes nothing. Rather than mistaking austerity for artistic seriousness, he relies on exacting performances, tightly controlled writing and the lingering power of unresolved historical wounds. The result is one of the festival’s most intellectually rigorous works – and among its most quietly devastating.

Fatherland had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival, where it’s competing for Palme d’Or, on May 14, 2026.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫

All modern families fester in their own modern ways. In Gentle Monster, Austrian director Marie Kreutzer returns to the Croisette with a drama built around the grim discomfort of watching the unthinkable take shape in front of us.

Recent European cinema has not lacked for dramas that shatter the image of the perfect family and the modern father. The Slovak Venice Orizzonti title Father also turns on an atrocity committed by a father, though leaves some room, however troublingly, for the viewer to imagine the catastrophe from within. Gentle Monster is colder, more accusatory and impossible to enter. Kreutzer creates a monster and places him in the systems that soften male monstrosity once it has revealed itself.

Philip Weiss (Laurence Rupp) appears, at first, like an ideal of contemporary masculinity. He is handsome, sculpted, established, a filmmaker recovering from severe burnout, after moving with his concert pianist wife Lucy (Léa Seydoux) and their young son Johnny to a fixer-upper house outside Munich. He Austrian, she is French, and their home moves easily between German, French and English. They seem like the picture of cultivated European bohemian comfort, complete with artistic careers, an active and affectionate sex life, and a lifestyle quietly cushioned by family wealth.

Kreutzer understands how such images protect men. Philip helps Johnny brush his teeth while they sing Coldplay’s “Yellow”, and the tenderness of the scene almost lets one overlook its disquieting details: Philip has just showered, his towel slips, and his nakedness around his child lands with queasy ambiguity. Yet Kreutzer also frames the moment with a deliberate emphasis on Philip’s physical confidence and desirability, presenting him as an unassailable image of masculine vitality. The drama’s early power lies in these small disturbances, moments that feel wrong before they can be named.

That wrongness soon becomes impossible to contain. As Lucy’s world unravels when Munich Police knock on their door with a warrant, she discovers that one cannot easily stop loving a monster, especially one who calls himself a gentle one. Seydoux gives Lucy a brittle intelligence and mounting helplessness. A mother is expected to be an explainer of the world to her child, she says to Johnny, yet is confronted with a world she can no longer explain even to herself.

What ensues is a guttural collapse of certainty. Beginning in the present before circling back into the family’s past after the revelations emerge, Gentle Monster forces earlier meek explanations to curdle in retrospect. The warmth, sensuality and ease the couple project at the outset no longer hold once revisited through the shifting perspective. Returning again to the present, Kreutzer leaves the viewer with the unsettling recognition that the signs were neither fully visible nor entirely invisible.

Austrian director’s gaze toward men is stark and unsparing, but Gentle Monster is not only about Philip. It also implicates the structures around him. Elsa Kühn (Jella Haase), a Munich special crimes officer involved in holding him accountable, carries her own private burden: a father with dementia who harasses and inappropriately touches his caretaker, Natalia. The point is blunt but effective. Men are excused, managed, softened, contextualized. Their violence is absorbed by women, by workers, by families, by systems designed to minimize rupture.

Early on, Johnny picks at the scab on his grazed knee and says it feels nice even if it hurts. The line becomes a bleak key to the film’s moral universe, where feeling, harm and explanation knot themselves together in ways the characters struggle to untangle.

Capped by an on-screen statistic that widens Philip’s atrocity into a European context, Gentle Monster argues that we can never fully know anyone. It is a blood-curdling premise, acted with precision and directed with control. Still, its severity cuts both ways. Kreutzer exposes the rot beneath the image of the perfect father, but does not entirely solve the question of whether subjecting us to this particular nightmare yields insight proportionate to the discomfort.

Gentle Monster had its world premiere at Cannes Film Festival, where it’s competing for Palme d’Or, on May 15, 2026.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ 1/2

Jane Schoenbrun caps their media trilogy, which began with the online challenge unease of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, moved to television screens in I Saw the TV Glow, and now culminates in a slasher-inflected plunge into Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma. The throughline remains consistent: palpable yet tacit notes on gender dysphoria, identity, spectatorship and mediated selfhood. Schoenbrun does not disappoint with this latest entry, which, unlike the first two, arrives with Hollywood names, or at least television icons, at the top of the call sheet.

Hannah Einbinder plays Kris, a young writer-director who spent her childhood obsessing over the fictional Camp Miasma franchise, a series about a summer camp where a somewhat supernatural serial killer, Little Death, emerges from the bottom of a lake to slash horny camp counsellors. Gillian Anderson plays Billy, the reclusive star of the original film and the franchise’s final girl figure. Little Death, meanwhile, is sure to inspire more than a few Halloween costumes this October, with an HVAC four-way diffuser sitting ominously on their head.

Opening with scenes from a set before launching into a montage tracing the troubled history of the Camp Miasma franchise, which has been misguidedly rebooted, reset and dragged back to its original mythology more than once – Hollywood in a nutshell these days. The montage also shows how the sequels fell out of favor with critics, complete with acerbic pull quotes and caustic review titles. It will not be the last time critics are mentioned. Kris, having earned critical favor for her radical reimagining of Hitchcock’s Psycho from the point of view of the shower curtain, now gets her Hollywood chance by resurrecting Camp Miasma. Her hope is to bring Billy back with it.

Artifice is the language through which Schoenbrun announces the medium itself. Storyboards bleed into finished shots, painted backdrops are everywhere, and much of the film consists of us watching characters watch the original Camp Miasma, in which the younger Billy is played by Amanda Fix. Kris is the embodiment of the contemporary writer-filmmaker: someone who gets overly excited about split diopters and casually announces that she “feels there’s about to be a jump scare.”

As with Schoenbrun’s earlier work, there is plenty of surrealism, liminality and allegory here, which may not sit well with everyone. But it is difficult not to laugh at the dynamic between Anderson’s secluded, veganism-is-a-phase actress and Einbinder’s early Gen Z/late millennial filmmaker. Their performances complement each other beautifully: Einbinder brings her stand-up timing and social awkwardness, while Anderson adds another variation to a career that has already moved from The X-Files iconography to Hannibal’s psychiatrist and Margaret Thatcher, now arriving at a Southern-accented former scream queen.

As the title promises, there is sex and there is death, though both arrive with a certain evasiveness. Kris is in a polyamorous relationship with a woman who also spends time with a man named Thor, a name he does not quite live up to, while Einbinder and Anderson work their strange chemistry into something deliberately confusing. Death, too, is present but noncommittal, much like our polyamorous protagonist. Sitting in the Debussy theatre in Cannes, where the film premiered, I found myself thinking of a line from The Crown: “We’re being filmed watching television. People might watch us watching television on their own television sets at home.” I occasionally turned my head and saw Schoenbrun and the cast watching a film in which characters watch a film that is more than a film. As surreality takes over, the question becomes whether Kris is making a film about Little Death or is it the other way around.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma had its world premier at Cannes Film Festival as the opening film in the Un Certain Regard Section on May 13, 2026.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ 1/2

Editor’s note: This review originally referred to the setting as New York, while The Drama is in fact set in Boston. The correction does not alter the central argument of the piece, which concerns the feature’s portrayal of upper-middle-class liberal aesthetics, selective morality and urban class performance.

With The Drama, Norwegian director Kristoffer Borgli makes his second American feature after two films in his native country, and once again turns social discomfort into both method and spectacle. The setup is elegantly cruel. A week before their wedding, Boston couple Emma (Zendaya) and Charlie (Robert Pattinson) sit down for what should be a celebratory tasting dinner with their closest friends Mike (Mamoudou Athie) and Rachel (Alana Haim), who are serving as best man and maid of honor. What begins as loose conversation and drunken oversharing hardens into a game of “what is the worst thing you have ever done?” The answers are ugly enough already. One involves using a girlfriend as a human shield against a rabid dog, another locking a neighbor’s child in an abandoned RV, another cyberbullying a classmate. Then Emma’s turn comes, and the room freezes.

Her confession concerns not an act carried out but a contemplated one, and it is here that The Drama locates its nastiest insight. The previous admissions, all concrete and cruel in their own ways, suddenly begin to recede before the specter of something unrealized. What matters is not harm in any stable ethical sense, but what kind of harm is most legible within the moral vocabulary of this particular American milieu. The result is a study in moral gerrymandering, in how actual wrongdoing can be relativized while a hypothetical deed, once it touches the right taboo nerve, assumes a greater symbolic charge than what has already been done.

That is where things are sharpest. Emma’s friends do not assess wrongdoing through any coherent framework so much as through the codes of a culture that has trained itself to confuse moral seriousness with correct rhetoric. Potential evil, once sufficiently politicized, begins to outweigh actual cruelty. What emerges is a portrait of urban thirtysomethings who seem less interested in reckoning with their deeds than in classifying them according to approved hierarchies of outrage. One of the cleverer recognitions here is that for this social class, ethics has become inseparable from language, and language inseparable from performance.

Charlie, a British museum curator working for the fictional Cambridge Art Museum in Boston, is especially rattled by his fiancé’s confession, and the fallout that follows is both comic and poisonous. Yet the film is not only interested in moral panic. It is equally invested in the aesthetics of their world, and in the way taste functions as both insulation and alibi. Emma wears a faded Harper’s Magazine T-shirt. Their apartment, all curated surfaces and studied restraint, looks assembled out of aspiration itself. There are Cesca chairs, dance lessons, floral consultations, menu tastings, photographer meetings and a DJ they want to fire for “smoking heroin” in the street, a line that says more about their class instincts than any monologue could. Even the intellectual life of these characters feels aestheticized. When Emma is shown reading The Damage by Harper Ellison, both fictional, the gesture lands less as evidence of thought than as another accessory in the costume of being the right kind of person.

The Drama is very good at catching such details. These are people whose lives are expensive in ways never named directly, whose jobs belong to that loose category of coastal knowledge work where one is permanently adjacent to culture, money and self-regard without ever having to explain where any of it comes from. Weddings are expensive everywhere, but here every expense is intensified by the logic of a city where everything must also be artisanal, tasteful and socially legible. In that sense, a great deal is understood about how this class performs itself.

The limitation is that observation is not the same as fluency. Borgli proves himself an astute observer of American neurosis, from NPR-shaped moral reflexes to carefully curated urban selfhood, yet he never fully fuses those perceptions into an organic whole. Too often, The Drama feels like an outsider’s very intelligent dossier on a social type rather than a work that has truly entered and inhabited that type from within. The signals are precise, the satirical targets clear, but the connective tissue remains thin. Rather than thickening into fully persuasive drama, everything often stays at the level of an extended and very clever thought experiment.

That thinness becomes more noticeable as the narrative escalates. Rachel, in particular, emerges as a telling figure in the way she manages to become affected by Emma’s confession through someone else’s trauma, effectively claiming proximity to injury by proxy. It is a mordant sketch of an American impulse to narrate every disturbance back toward the self. Yet sketches are what much of this drama boils down to. The satire lands, often brutally, but the characters never quite gather the density that would turn them from carriers of an argument into fully persuasive people.

Even so, the final movement leaves behind a bitter aftertaste that is earned. By the time the wedding itself gives way to disaster and the dust begins to settle, what emerges is not trust, forgiveness or any serious shared reckoning, but something colder and more contemporary. The wedding may have imploded, but the logic of investment remains. Too much has already been poured into the relationship, into the shared life, into the image of themselves as a couple, for either of them to truly walk away. If there is a final diagnosis of its generation, it is this: everything is commodity, everything is investment, everything is aesthetics. So long as the façade can be preserved, almost anything can be absorbed.

At its best, The Drama is viciously funny and genuinely perceptive about the moral choreography of a certain American metropolitan class. It sees how taste, politics and selfhood have collapsed into one another, and how even confession can become another performance of identity. What it does not quite manage is to turn that diagnosis into a fully cohesive whole. Sharp, brittle and often acerbically entertaining, it remains more impressive as social autopsy than as drama. Coming after Past Lives and alongside something like Materialists, it also suggests an A24 strain that has grown increasingly enamored of metropolitan class aesthetics while yielding diminishing returns. What once felt observant now risks hardening into brand habit.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫

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Recent film history has hardly been starved of ambitious science fiction concerned with space, alien encounter, and the limits of human knowledge. From Prometheus and Interstellar to Arrival, the genre has produced works drawn from cult franchises, original screenplays, and literary sources that managed to make scientific inquiry feel thrilling, urgent, and cinematically alive. It is against those now-canonical titles that Project Hail Mary arrives already at a disadvantage. Andy Weir’s source novel is built around the slow, repetitive, often dramatically inert grind of the scientific method, and what may read as procedural fascination on the page translates here into something stubbornly anti-cinematic. In the hands of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, a directing duo more at home in glib irreverence than awe, the result is a slick but inferior screen version that often feels like an Amazon Basics approximation of superior modern science fiction.

At its center is Dr. Ryland Grace, played with overextended goofiness by Ryan Gosling, a high-school teacher with a doctorate drafted into a mission to stop a single-celled alien organism from consuming the Sun and threatening Earth with catastrophe. The premise already asks for a great deal of suspension of disbelief, but the adaptation compounds that problem by framing Grace less as a convincing scientist than as a fantasy of scientific self-importance. He is a pick-me genius, a figure built around the adolescent wish that the world, having once failed to appreciate him, will one day beg for his return. His retreat from academia after challenging scientific dogma is meant to mark him as an outsider visionary. Instead, the script flatters the audience with a familiar technocratic fantasy that the maverick misfit was right all along and that institutions exist mainly to suppress brilliance until the apocalypse forces their hand.

More damningly, Grace is not even anchored to Earth by love, family, or any deep sense of belonging. He has no living relatives, no great attachments, nothing that might make his refusal of the mission tragic in any substantial sense. What the story instead gives us is the platonic ideal of a certain modern male hollowness: rootless, cowardly, governed by naked self-preservation, and apparently willing to gamble humanity’s future for the mere continuation of his own life, only to be later recast as heroic as though that moral smallness were merely another stage in a hero’s journey. Gosling’s performance leans hard into a recognizable contemporary type, all knitted cardigans and sensible sweaters, Converse, bicycle-riding awkwardness, colorful socks, and curated nerd charm, the aesthetic of a certain soft, extended adolescence masquerading as depth. The whole thing feels less like characterization than branding.

That same childishness extends to the story’s view of humanity under existential threat. As wars rage across the globe and international cooperation grows ever more threadbare in real life, Project Hail Mary asks us to believe that the world instantly unites, hands effectively unlimited authority and resources to a German administrator Eva Stratt, and efficiently mobilizes for interstellar salvation. This fantasy of planetary consensus might once have passed for optimism. Today, it plays as naïve bordering on delusional. The whole enterprise badly needs some grounding sense of political reality, especially when asking viewers to accept that humanity could pull off such staggering feats of coordination and space travel within a matter of years. Without that realism, the stakes never acquire weight. What emerges is less a serious thought experiment than a glossy bedtime story about competent institutions and obedient nations.

Sandra Hüller, to her credit, seems born to play someone like Stratt. She does a great deal with very little, lending severity, intelligence, and a kind of cold bureaucratic conviction to what is finally a rather one-dimensional role. The screenplay gives her function more than character, but Hüller’s presence at least suggests a harder, more interesting version of this material lurking somewhere beneath the surface, one less interested in reassuring us that the right experts will save the day than in interrogating the costs of giving them that power.

Then there is the alien itself, which reveals another limit of Weir’s imagination. One of the enduring challenges of science fiction is how to imagine life that does not merely resemble recombinations of earthly species. Yet the creature design here falls back on exactly that impulse, giving us something that feels like a rock-laced arachnid assembled from familiar biological cues. Rather than expanding the imagination, the film narrows it, asking us to marvel at something that never quite escapes the gravitational pull of Earth’s own visual archive.

The problem, though, is not only that Project Hail Mary borrows too liberally from better science fiction, but that the adaptation process itself exposes how thin its material becomes on screen. Weir’s novel depends heavily on Ryland Grace’s interiority, on the stop-start rhythm of amnesia, recollection, and retroactive self-understanding as his memories gradually return while the mission unfolds aboard the ship. On the page, that structure at least gives the character a psychological scaffolding. On screen, however, that internal back-and-forth is inevitably compressed, hurried through, and stripped of much of its introspective texture. What remains is not a richly fractured consciousness but a screenplay mechanism, a delivery system for exposition that shuttles between flashbacks and present-tense jeopardy with diminishing dramatic payoff.

It is difficult, in the end, to separate disdain for the adaptation from disdain for its source material. Weir’s limitations as a writer, already apparent in The Martian, become even harder to ignore here. His background as a software programmer turned pop-science novelist gives his work a rough-edged enthusiasm, but not the intellectual depth or narrative sophistication needed to sustain this kind of story. Weir is no Kip Thorne, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist whose work helped ground Interstellar, and Project Hail Mary is no Interstellar either. When the narrative pushes for transcendence, its desperation to manufacture feeling becomes unmistakable. The crescendo is staged in a way that is hard not to read as an echo of Interstellar’s “No Time for Caution,” a piece of orchestral, high-stakes spectacle designed to override thought through velocity and emotion alone. It is one of the adaptation’s more effective passages on a purely manipulative level, but also one of its most revealing. The uplift feels less earned than engineered, calibrated with the precision of a corporation that knows exactly which sentimental buttons to press. That is perhaps fitting for a studio backed by a company that has built an empire on predicting desire and monetizing impulse. Project Hail Mary does not arrive at emotion honestly. It extracts it.

This is the real failure of Project Hail Mary. It does not merely imitate better works, it diminishes what made them resonate in the first place. Where Arrival found mystery in language, where Interstellar reached for sublimity, and where even Prometheus, for all its flaws, had the courage of its own grandiosity, this one settles for competence, quirk, and corporate feeling. It resembles the ecosystem that produced it: sleek, efficient, consumer-tested, and expertly designed to simulate emotion while hollowing out the thing itself.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫

The scarcity of recognition obscures talent’s ubiquity. Marty Mauser is a talented table tennis player, alright, one of those people who makes a niche look like fate. A Jewish New Yorker coming of age in the shadow of the Holocaust with a vision of himself too large to fit inside his body, Marty has an unparalleled gift that’s perhaps second only to his ego. The film’s real tension comes from the mismatch between that ego and the arbitrary, narrow system that rewards this particular kind of excellence, a sport most people still treat like a joke, governed by committees, legitimized by patrons, and remembered by almost no one outside of first place.

Josh Safdie and Ronald Bronstein’s script carves Marty as he hustles to scrape together the money to travel to London for the British Open, and then, later, to the World Championship in Japan. Along the way he ties his entire self-worth to his expectations, to an exit, a solution, a way out. It is as if his salesman id and ego are sharing custody over his agency, having completely ousted the superego from his psychological architecture. Shortsightedness is in the bones of this film. The almost claustrophobic shots offer only one way out, forward, onward. Safdie shoots Marty like a man in a corridor who keeps calling the corridor a horizon, sprinting toward recognition as if it can finally deliver what he actually wants, not victory, not money, not legacy, but a verdict on himself.

It’s unsurprising that this is Safdie’s first feature as a father. Spanning nine months, a gestational period, it translates the developmental stages of an embryo onto the destructive stages of an ego, just in time for Marty to metabolize the possibility of living for something greater than himself, and to recoil from it. Safdie makes that connection literal from the first minutes. In the shoe-store backroom where Marty works, a furtive encounter with his married childhood friend Rachel Mizler (Odessa A’zion) is visualized as sperm reaching for egg, the image then morphing into a table tennis ball, as if even conception must be converted into Marty’s private mythology of achievement. When Rachel becomes pregnant, he defaults to denial, “not mine,” and the film’s nine-month structure stops being a clever conceit and becomes an indictment.

To Marty Mauser, nothing is holy. Talking to the press ahead of his face-off at the British Open with the five-year world champion Béla Kletzki, a Holocaust survivor, Marty remarks: “Listen, I’m basically gonna do to Kletzki what Auschwitz couldn’t… I’m gonna finish the job.” Then he adds that he’s allowed to say it because he’s Jewish himself, “Hitler’s worst nightmare.” The line is not just ugly, it’s revealing. Marty’s relationship to history is not reverence, not grief, not responsibility, but permission. He treats inherited catastrophe as a credential, a shield that lets him say whatever he wants, whenever it serves him.

Kletzki takes the loss with a steadiness Marty can’t access, no sulking, no mythology, just proportion, and that dignity becomes its own rebuke. At dinner, Kletzki tells the Holocaust honey story, and Safdie doesn’t just let us hear it, he shows it, letting Kletzki’s narration ride over flashback images, staged with hushed reverence and a Daniel Lopatin score that doesn’t cue emotion so much as haunt it. He describes being spared because Nazi camp guards recognized his table tennis talent, sent out to dismantle bombs in the woods, and finding a beehive. He smokes the bees out, smears honey over his body, then lets his starving bunkmates lick it off for nourishment. Safdie told the Guardian the anecdote is based on a real survivor, Alojzy Ehrlich, and that he “learned more about the Holocaust in that little story than from some movies that are only about the Holocaust.” Safdie uses this tangent to show what it did to bodies, to dignity, to community, how survival can look like an intimacy you’d never consent to in any other world. Which is why Marty’s “Hang on, you’re gonna love this,” as he implores a wealthy businessman Milton Rockwell (Kevin O’Leary, Shark Tank’s Mr. Wonderful) to stay longer, lands as pure desecration, a command to enjoy what cannot be enjoyed.

The echoes and aftershocks of World War II weave through this story set in 1956, not even a decade after its end. Having defeated Kletzki at the British Open, Marty loses to Koto Endo in the final, a Japanese player, a young man deafened by wartime air raids. The world doesn’t remember seconds, especially not in table tennis. So Marty resorts to half-time acts at tournaments across the world, from my native Bosnia and Herzegovina to Egypt, turning his talent into a traveling performance, the very humiliation he sneered at earlier. In Egypt, he even chisels a piece off the Great Pyramid and brings it home to his mother as a gift. “We built that,” he remarks. It’s a joke with a blade in it, a grab for ownership, legacy, and grandeur, as if history itself can be pocketed and presented as proof of worth.

The dynamic between Marty and Milton Rockwell is further complicated by Marty’s affair with Rockwell’s retired actress wife Kay Stone (Gwyneth Paltrow). Marty Supreme, unlike The Brutalist or Foxcatcher, takes a more cynical, and frankly more realistic, view of artistic-athletic patronage, not as mutually, if asymmetrically, elevating proximity between money and talent, but as a blunt instrument. Marty is faced with a request from his would-be patron that cuts against his sense of self, and he refuses. What follows isn’t a moral lesson about hustling. It’s a lesson about power. Safdie isn’t studying petty scheming so much as the unmovable veto of money and those who wield it. Marty can be brilliant and still be disposable. He can be gifted and still be laughed out of the room.

It’s telling that Marty’s nemesis is Japanese, not because the film is making a simplistic “enemy” out of Japan, but because Marty is forced into proximity with the war’s other wound, one he can’t claim through identity. Mere years separate the dropping of the atom bombs and Marty finds himself one degree removed from a different horror of the same conflict, close enough to feel history’s heat, not close enough to feel accountable for it. That distance becomes his most human impulse and his most damning one, a kind of historical tabula rasa, an insistence on being freed from the burdens of the generation that came before him, while still using those burdens when they benefit him.

In the end, regardless of his talent, Marty is at odds with the system that recognizes it, a committee-patron complex, governing bodies, gatekeepers, and financing businessmen who decide what counts, what sells, and who gets to matter. Marty doesn’t get the recognition he craves, but he does get the vindication he needs to accept that he’s becoming a father, and that living for something greater than himself has finally entered the frame. Posterity draws him into his own people’s history, not as a credential but as a responsibility. The fight by proxy is no longer just for him, or even for his child, but for those he kept treating as a shield.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ 1/2

In Anniversary, Oscar-nominated Polish director Jan Komasa abandons the social neuroses of modern Poland to diagnose America’s. It’s an ambitious pivot and a precarious one. Entering the genre of American political dystopia as someone who has never lived inside the country’s contradictions makes the attempt to “intuitively” dismantle the world’s oldest democracy feel, from the outset, like wishful thinking.

Conceived during the pandemic and co-written with debut American screenwriter Lori Rosene-Gambino, Anniversary lands in 2025 with an unfortunate synchronicity: real-world U.S. political unrest has outpaced the film’s imagined anxieties. The story follows Ellen and Paul Taylor (Diane Lane and Kyle Chandler), a comfortably liberal Washington D.C. power couple, she a Georgetown political theorist, he a chef beloved by the capital’s elite, whose marriage anniversaries anchor five years of escalating unease. Their children orbit the narrative mostly as set dressing; the real catalyst arrives via Josh (Dylan O’Brien), the one floundering offspring, and Elizabeth (Phoebe Dynevor), his newest girlfriend.

Elizabeth is more than a rebound. She’s a former student of Ellen’s, a disciple-turned-antagonist who once wrote a thesis so steeped in radical rhetoric that Ellen quietly shoved her out of academia. Elizabeth resurrects that thesis as a book, the cover emblazoned with a distorted American flag whose stars have migrated to the center. It becomes a phenomenon. A movement. A template for national rebirth in all the wrong ways.

Komasa frames this ideological creep across the backdrop of family rituals: anniversaries, birthdays, the obligatory Thanksgiving. This domesticity only highlights how schematic the film’s psychology is. The “vengeful daughter-in-law” trope, deployed here without subversion, feels imported from prestige soap operas rather than a filmmaker known for Corpus Christi and Suicide Room. As Elizabeth’s influence metastasizes, the Taylors unravel in utterly predictable beats.

Stylistically, the film could pass for a lost episode of The Handmaid’s Tale: the desaturated blues and greys, the cool undertone, the architecture of dread. Story-wise, it borrows the structure and emotional register of Russell T Davies’ Years and Years, Mike Flanagan’s The Fall of the House of Usher, and Scott Z. Burns’ Extrapolations. These comparisons would be flattering if Anniversary pushed the genre forward. It doesn’t. It merely echoes.

The writing commits to a reductionist view of its characters: mothers must choose between children and intellectual responsibility; fathers are rendered as timid, malleable vessels eager for ideological grooming. Komasa and Rosene-Gambino gesture at the idea that creation—of children, of ideas, of movements—is inherently derivative and uncontrollable. You can raise a monster without ever being one; restraining that monster once it grows teeth is the real fiction. Dante had thoughts about good intentions paving certain roads; Anniversary never finds the courage to follow that road to its end.

The film also inherits the studied neutrality of Alex Garland’s Civil War, refusing to identify its radical movement with either real-world American political extreme. But where Garland’s ambiguity felt pointed, here it reads like evasion. The Taylors are clearly affluent liberals; the film’s refusal to name the ideology threatening them feels like creative cowardice rather than narrative strategy.

In the end, Komasa’s characters, and Komasa himself, fall on their own swords. A film ostensibly about the dangers of derivative creation becomes, regrettably, an example of it. The irony writes itself.

Anniversary premiered as the opening film of the 41st Warsaw International Film Festival on October 11, 2025, and was released theatrically in the U.S. by Lionsgate on October 29.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫

Kathryn Bigelow once again turns her camera toward American militarism under duress, following The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty. With less than an hour to impact, members of various U.S. government and military offices scramble to determine who launched a nuclear ballistic missile heading for the continental United States and how to respond, confronted by the realization that while rehearsal is orderly, reality is entropic.

Accompanied by Volker Bertelmann’s score, which more than nods to his work on Conclave, one can’t help but feel that a papal drama is about to unfold in a new Rome on the Potomac. While no pope dies here, an American conclave does take place, with the fate of the world on the ballot.

Bigelow’s venture into hyperlink cinema, retelling a 37-minute crisis in real time from detection to impact, falters as the characters’ worlds intersect through video conferencing, revealing little new information in each retelling and steadily draining narrative tension. Meant to reflect the bureaucratic redundancies of an American crisis apparatus, the experience of watching it still borders on punishment. Noah Oppenheim’s screenplay shows that familiarity with writing a White House for a chamber drama like Jackie fails to translate into a thriller of this scale. One can’t help but wonder if the exhaustion is deliberate or simply the by-product of a faltering experiment.

The barrage of military acronyms and procedural jargon, spelled out on screen, is intended to orient the viewer but only triggers fatigue. It is the kind of thriller made for Netflix multitaskers: if you miss something the first time, you will catch it in the second or third retelling.

Micro push-pull camerawork desperately searches for psychological realism, only to be undercut by the dissonance of British actors filling the roles of the President of the United States (Idris Elba) and the Secretary of Defense (Jared Harris), the latter having recently portrayed King George VI in The Crown.

With crisp, propulsive editing, A House of Dynamite sustains its procedural rhythm to dizzying effect, despite the retellings, or maybe in spite of them, which is aided by Bertelmann’s masterful, albeit derivative, growling string orchestra.

A redeeming element lies in the dynamic between the grandeur of the U.S. war machine and the impolitic nature of humans who steer it: the President yawns, a military official eats junk food near the control panel that can launch ballistic missiles, and everyone sweats. Bigelow scrutinizes the line separating an American patriot from a loved one fearing loss and shows that breaking of protocol is not a question of if but when. Closing in on the cracks within a system that’s supposed to be ready for anything (United States spent more than $1 trillion USD on defense this year) reveals that a well-oiled machine can corrode and disintegrate with the first drop of sweat.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫

It only takes a glance at Marco Berger’s filmography to deduce that queer themes, primarily those centered around gay men, abound in his films. However, passing Dog-Dog as anything remotely gay-themed is a bit of a stretch, which didn’t hinder it from screening at three LGBTQ festivals. During a vacation in rural Argentina, two heterosexual couples encounter nude men behaving like dogs, whom they treat as such, with a disquieting naturalness. Juan, one of the cabin dwellers, forms a bond with a dog-man, feeds, bathes, and even names him, against his girlfriend’s counsel. With their stay at the cabin nearing the end, Juan lobbies his girlfriend to adopt Max and take him with them to Buenos Aires.

The absurdist concept of the film can lead one to speculate about its diegetic anchor. Is this a film about a muted dystopian future where some humans grow up feral and live dog-like lives or is the narrative set in a parallel universe where things simply are the way they have been since time immemorial? In either case, seeing certain men and women be at a visible advantage over others, while whistling at the latter and calling to them with phrases such as “come here boy,” or “do you have an owner” will be a bitter pill to swallow for many viewers, considering that our history has seen people treated this way through corrosive systems of colonialism and slavery.

Similarly, one can argue that the film holds a mirror to the notion and ethics of pet ownership and certain practices humans have normalized when it comes to our furry companions. At several points in the film Juan kisses his naked anatomical equal, on the mouth, tongue and all, which, while visually homoerotic is contextually castrated by an unequivocal boundary that anything more is considered an act of reprehensible abuse. As such, any inkling that this film might be exploring the master-submissive dynamic represented in gay culture is nipped at the bud.

Perhaps the single line that encompasses the Argentine director’s 11^th feature film comes as the protagonist tells a childhood story of when he traveled to Norway to visit his grandfather, who took him to a remote, snow-covered field at night, during a full moon that was so bright, its reflection against the snow lit up the entire valley, like floodlights of a stadium. Juan describes it as beautiful, but distressing to the mind. Perhaps that is the way to receive this film, oozing with tenderness and some kind of love between the two visually interchangeable equals, who are anything but given the film’s odd social hierarchies and penchant for pseudospecies.

Reviewed on October 11, 2025 when it was screened in the Free Spirit section of the 41^st Warsaw International Film Festival.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ 1/2

In an interview with the Deadline’s Damon Wise last month, talking about his identity of an artist from a small country, Lapid compared “being an Israeli filmmaker was like being, maybe, a Bosnian filmmaker.” Let’s remember that he talks about the same Bosnia that 30 years later is still reeling from a genocide, the only on the European continent since the Holocaust, of its Muslim-majority population. I can’t help but find his comparison in poor taste.

Then again, both the Western Balkans country and that between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River were once territories on the opposite extremes of the Ottoman Empire, under its control for almost 4 centuries (1516-1878). It’s not a surprise that Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo, is sometimes referred to as the Jerusalem of Europe.

But back to Yes that David Ehrlich dubbed The Zone of Interest without the garden wall. One thing that made the British film gut-wrenching was the mundanity of evil marked by its proximity to unfathomable, yet nothing but eerily faint, aural suffering. Less than a century later, the evil is still mundane and in proximity, even greater so in light of its repetition and willful historical amnesia.

However, dissonance and distraction are the name of the game, upending all we knew and expected evil to be. Whereas the dystopian futures imagined through the works of art ascribed refinement and sophistication to their villains, our dystopian present and Lapid’s satirical Yes burden us with clowns and demagogues who live and breathe kitsch, leaving most people unable to grasp the dangers of their evil.

The crux of Yes is that everyone is a couple of yeses from capitulating to the worst of humanity. If you find that hard to comprehend, just remember that it only takes folding [a paper] 42 times to get from the Earth to the Moon.

I am not certain that this will be a wake-up call for many Israelis. Yes was made for people already aghast by Israel’s asymmetrical response to the October 7 attack. I can imagine that many audience members felt uneasy when, at the opening credits of the film, they saw that it was made with support from Israel Film Fund (a public fund supported by the Israeli Ministry of Culture). Any money that the government of Israel spends towards anything but the killing, starving, and oppressing of the Palestinian people is money well spent, even if they’re doing it to maintain the already crumbling facade of democracy.

Whereas James Joyce ends his masterpiece Ulysses with “Yes I said yes I will Yes" affirming life, love, and acceptance in light of the day’s hardships; Nadav Lapid shows us how that same Yes can affirm compromises and moral deterioration in light of an indiscriminate massacre.

Review published on Letterboxd on August 21, 2025 when it was screened in the Kinoscope section of the 31^st Sarajevo Film Festival.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ ⚫

Every year, when Cannes announces their competition program, there is always a film that will draw me in solely with its poetic title. Last year it was The Seed of the Sacred Fig and Three Kilometres to the End of the World. This year, The Sound of Falling. Somewhat similar, only in title, to Anatomy of a Fall—this film presents us with an anatomy of an opaque family tree.

There’s a line from this year’s Palm d’Or winner that goes something like: “scream until your screams are etched on the walls of this room.” This German film explores how quiet suffering can get etched on the walls of a family home just as effectively as screams. Its thesis posits that trauma has somatic manifestations, it alters the very essence of our beings—our genetic code—and is endowed to posterity. The Sound of Falling is a homework kind of film, more precisely a film that warrants feeling its 149-minute run first and then thinking as the credits start rolling.

Told through four generations of women, Alma, Erika, Angelika, and Lenka, living on a farm in northern Germany, who occasionally narrate, we follow them from sometime before the First World War to present day, for roughly a century, in a non-traditional narrative style in which chronology is merely a suggestion.

There is a fair amount of falling in this film; some intentional, some forced, and some through the veil of time. It’s almost as if dwelling on a particular feeling or dissonance bridges past and present. But what does the sound of falling actually sound like? Unless witnessed, falling is very quiet occurrence; a parallel can be made with falling of trauma through generations and the tendency of patterns of abuse to persist.

Thinking about this film, it occurred to me that it represents the Petite Maman antithesis. Whereas the daughter of Petite Maman meets her maman when they’re both the same age and interacts with her without obstruction, the characters of The Sound of Falling only transcend time when they experience similar abuse and/or feelings.

In this film, generational trauma isn’t only passed to offspring. It lingers on the walls of the farm that are sturdy and corporal relative to the frail walls and windows between past and the future often felt by the four generations of women whose ancestral relationship is less clear than the patterns of abuse they all experience, one way or another.

Review published on Letterboxd on August 18, 2025 when it was screened in the Kinoscope section of the 31^st Sarajevo Film Festival.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫ 1/2

Who would have thought that after Hulu’s successful flagship Muslim TV show Ramy, Netflix would want one of their own? Despite the actual Muslim world being in a state of disarray, filmmakers of the world’s second largest religion are united in grief, comedy, and their diverse yet steadfast commitment towards Palestine.

Whereas Ramy studies the gen Z character of its titular lead, Netflix’s Mo (short for Mohammed) shows us what it’s like to be a millennial Muslim man in the United States. That is, a Palestinian refugee who’s been seeking asylum for the majority of his life, that he spends living in Houston, TX with his mother and an older neurodiverse brother. There’s another caveat in this story; none of them are authorized to legally work in a country that has been their home for more than two decades.

Their predicament is exactly what the showrunners use as an inexhaustible source of misery-loves-comedy bits, sprinkled with very authentic albeit somewhat mirthful struggles of Muslims in the Judeo-Christian West.

However, as we laugh at some of the pickles Mo keeps finding himself in, we slowly realize that said predicaments are not his first and their recurrence is actually wearing him down to the detriment of his everyday life and well-being. I couldn’t help but liken Mo’s run-ins with the system (that constantly keeps gaslighting him) to that of the twins’ from Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events. Only in his case, life really isn’t a conundrum as much as an impossible system and common sense is being passed for esoterica.

Mo’s biggest problem, however, is Mo. Not in the way of a character flaw, quite the opposite. In trying to stay consistent and loyal to core Islamic and Palestinian values, which are at odds with the contemporary West, Mo constantly has to choose between right and easy. This causes him grief, as it does to a lot of Muslim men, not only those in the US but any pluralistic society. Which is not to say that Mo’s character is flawless. He struggles to communicate, partly because he tries to shield loved ones from the weight of his emotions and the precariousness of their shared circumstances.

The concept of belonging and inclusion are also recurring themes in the show and Mo has his belonging challenged almost daily because of an immigration system so outdated that its paradoxes have become screaming behemoths. Too bad the behemoths are hidden in the dark corners of a 350-million people rave. This affiliation without inclusion ironically leads to a diverse community of accepting limbo-dwellers who sustain the show’s emotional texture. For the most part, they exist outside of the system, to the disadvantage of those that keep them there. We get to see this as the show occasionally introduces the main characters to ordinary Americans whose lives are improved without exception, if only infinitesimally, because of these interactions.

Like many Palestinians, Mo and his family have a story that is gut-wrenching and their wounds run deep, yet hate for the Israeli occupiers is not a part of their emotional lexicon; rage certainly, but never hate.

Good friends are there in Mo’s life and they are the everyday second-generation immigrants or waiting-to-be-Americans who seldom get enough spotlight in the mainstream television. More importantly, they are the witnesses of the Palestinian condition and its rich culture; you bet they know that hummus is Palestinian and not Israeli.

The show explores a range of modern-day afflictions such as addiction, inter-faith relationships, stigmatization of therapy and neurodiversity, and does so with such care and responsibility.

But none of this would work half as well were it not for the amazing performance of Mohammed (Mo) Amer who co-created the show with Ramy Youssef (yes of Hulu’s Ramy–there is a trend of these Muslim filmmakers creating and naming their shows and lead characters after themselves). Amer’s ability to write and embody the unrelenting sorrow of his protagonist is a testament to his talent but also a blueprint and a point of reflection for Muslim men everywhere.

What’s interesting in the case of both Mo and Ramy is that these shows explore characters who are at the opposite extremes of a center. This speaks to the restrictions still present in the making of media about Muslims–courtesy of Islamophobic attitudes in the West.

Lastly, do not go into this show expecting only laughs and good time. These are guaranteed, but not without some sorrow, especially when, in real life, Palestinians in Gaza are being exterminated and Palestinians in West Bank forcefully displaced from their homes. While I can guarantee that Mo will make you laugh, I can almost certainly guarantee it will make you sob too; especially in the series finale, which ends with the eve of October 6, 2023, just one day before the real-life events of October 7.

Rating: ⚫ ⚫ ⚫