Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) is a former MMA/cage-fighter who is looking to make a living from personal training. Things aren't looking too good for the future of her career, but that looks set to change when she's made an offer to work for a rich family in the Middle East. She can make some good money doing what she loves, but it soon becomes clear that the young women she has been hired to train aren't all that interested in learning exercises and fitness.
Written and directed by Kurdwin Ayub, an Iraq-born film-maker who has been making features for about a decade now, Moon is a low-key and intriguing film that keeps viewers fairly comfortable until things start to close in around the main characters. But that's all down to the distractions provided by Ayub. Because these are characters who are closed in from the very first time that they're put together. Moon looks at complicity, it looks at the systems put in place by powerful people to maintain control of the environment, and the people, around them, and it looks at ways in which desperate people can struggle to fully convey their situation to others.
Ayub does as much with the dialogue as she does with what's unsaid. Glances between characters tell of necessarily silent communications. People with everything they could apparently ever want yearn for some of the simple mod-cons that we all take for granted (such as wi-fi and mobile phones). Are we being shown a paradise or a prison, and how much does the distinction matter for those who are observing as an outsider?
While there's a very good supporting cast here, with the main young women to be trained by Sarah played by Celina Sarhan, Andria Tayeh, and Nagham Abu Baker, Holzinger holds the screen in a way that keeps you focused on her situation, and keeps you right alongside her as she slowly starts to figure out the full complexity of her situation. Sarah is the confounded visitor, and Holzinger portrays her as someone walking a tightrope between sensing something not being quite right and hoping to do enough to keep earning her pay, which may mean looking elsewhere to avoid certain truths.
Ayub looks at a specific situation here, but it's another case of something specific being used to show something that many others can identify with, whether that is the need many women feel to always be ready to defend themselves and physically fight off danger or the various bad situations that are allowed to continue because too many people do nothing to help, either because of fear or because of how much they can benefit from those in power. This has face-to-face personal interactions in every scene, but could easily be a comment on the many politicians and business leaders who rarely keep human rights and personal freedoms as a priority ahead of business deals and ambitious international ventures.
8/10
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