Director: Kurdwin Ayub
Stars: Florentina Holzinger, Andria Tayeh, Celina Antwan
Point of view is key in Iraqi filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub’s judiciously cagy thriller Moon, which has arrived in the UK to stream on MUBI. When veteran MMA fighter Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) is hired by a Jordanian family to travel from Austria to train the family’s three daughters, we’re with her – and her alone – the whole way. A strong, self-assured woman, Sarah is thrown off-balance by her isolation in a foreign country, coerced by smiling faces into signing NDAs and persisting in a situation that increasingly doesn’t add-up.
The three daughters – Nour (Andria Tayeh), Fatima (Cleina Antwan) and Schaima (Nagham Abu Baker) – show little interest in their training, preferring to chill or go to the mall, leaving Sarah feeling adrift and useless. Her boss – elder brother Abdul (Omar AlMajali) – has strict rules about social media use and which parts of the expansive house are off-limits to Sarah, but her instinct to bond with the girls leads her into compromising situations. She’s often caught between one infraction or another.
Gradually Sarah comes to suspect that the girls are being mistreated, maybe even tortured, as idle gossip at the hotel bar stirs her imagination. We only ever see the events from her perspective. A sliver of truth. As things progress we’re inclined to draw the same conclusions Sarah is making, but the formal constriction makes us suspicious also. What is it that Ayub is keeping deliberately out of frame?
Daughters trapped in an abusive domestic stranglehold, imprisoned within a house. It openly recalls films like Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides or Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s Mustang. But where the former drew conclusions from a distance and the latter set us within the experience of the sisters, Moon hunkers down in the powerlessness of a sole individual caught in the mezzanine between the two. Sarah’s a strong person, but the situation has her weak. Holzinger – a renowned choreographer and performance artist – is crucial in making this thing work. Sarah’s evident empathy for the girls, as well as her own isolated circumstance, are conveyed through stoic frustration. We’re with her both physically and emotionally.
The first two thirds carefully amp up the aura of mystery and unease before the film uses a combustive incident to compel a change. It fleetingly feels as though Moon is going to transform into a jailbreak thriller, pitting limited means against the resources of the super-rich. But Ayub delivers a southpaw, ejecting Sarah (and us) from this assumed narrative. We’re left like an astronaut disconnected from the umbilical, flailing backward into space.
The lack of clarifications may leave some floundering, but Ayub’s insistence on restricting Moon to Sarah’s perspective is an interesting (if not always successful) experiment in narrowing the dramatic field of vision. This receives a visual echo in the only deviations from Sarah’s experience; videos recorded on her phone in portrait, hemmed in by their thick black borders.
Elements of the film’s construction nag. Why, for instance, bring Sarah into such a potentially combustible situation in the first place? It’s a contrivance that Moon never really manages to hurdle. But accept it as a decision and what unfolds seems ultimately designed to make us ask what we’d do, what lengths would we take to uphold our convictions or moral compass? This is a slippery one, but it may well linger even once it’s slipped craftily through your fingers…
The Lost Highway Hotel 