‘Furies’ Review: A Riveting Lebanese Heist Drama

Furies counts George Clooney among its executive producers — worth noting for the clout factor but mainly as a point of comparison: Rami Kodeih’s extraordinary first feature might be called an anti-Ocean’s heist picture, as rough-and-tumble as the starry franchise is slick. Propelled by a raw, heart-pounding ferocity, the Beirut-set drama is a sharp fusion of personal desperation and political rage, as specific to Lebanon’s economic crisis as it is generally, woefully recognizable. When one of the two sisters at the story’s center describes “being broke in a fucked-up country with no options,” her words have a discomforting resonance that extends beyond any one nation’s borders.

From its opening scenes in a bank, where bureaucratic blah-di-blah gives way to sheer terror, to its gripping final sequence, the movie infuses a time-tested genre with the unpredictable energy of real people interacting — and, crucially, the offhand wiseass humor of siblings who know and love each other deeply, brought to messy, magnificent life in two spectacular performances.

It’s the spring of 2022, three years since the collapse of the country’s banks froze deposits and left citizens with no access to their money. Inflation has reached absurd heights, the Lebanese pound is all but worthless, and the government shuts off the electricity for more than half of each day. Desperation is the defining mood, mostly sublimated and sometimes bursting through the surface, as when a man demanding his savings threatens self-immolation at the bank.

Maro (Rym Mroue), too, goes understandably berserk at that same bank branch, after being denied access to her savings account — or a loan against it — to pay for life-saving surgery for her younger sister, Dalia (Maria Nakouzi). Dalia, who works in the office of a water-truck company, has been diagnosed with uterine cancer. The good news is that it was caught early. On the other side of the pros-and-cons ledger, insurance will cover only 10 percent of the operation’s cost. In their struggles to make ends meet, Maro tries to sell jewelry, including family heirlooms, and Dalia appeals to an old friend, Annie (Lamia Ghandour), for a chance at sex work, a gambit that doesn’t go well.

Maro’s been facing a personal war of attrition for a while now. Having lost her barbershop in her divorce, she now lives with Dalia and cuts hair on their apartment’s small balcony. Her vindictive ex (Bob Ajami) seldom lets her see their son, Ali (Dani Mahmoud), a spirited boy of around 10, but his easy bond with his mother and aunt is evident in their every interaction. Away from Ali, Maro’s playful energy has a taut intensity, while Dalia, donning a sparkly outfit, lets off steam on club dance floors and in casual hookups. The urgency of Dalia’s situation has hit her sister harder than it’s hit her.

Armed with medical and financial documentation, Maro lays out a reasonable argument to the bank manager (Fouad Yammine), who, in a fittingly over-the-top bit of aural and visual editing, chomps down his salad with monstrous greed between sound bites of institutional indifference. Maro’s meltdown continues out on the street after the heel of one of her leopard-print shoes breaks. In a sly nod to the sort of rom-com conventions that this story has no time for, a dreamily handsome young concierge (Hadi Bou Ayash) comes to her rescue. Soon, in the neighborly comfort of his apartment, Maro discovers that it lies just a wall away from the bank, whose vault, she’s certain, contains stacks of American dollars.

Husband-and-wife screenwriting partners Kodeih and Nora Mariana have drawn from their own experience of recent difficult years in Lebanon, and have also taken inspiration from a legendary and never-solved 1976 bank heist in Beirut, the largest robbery of safe deposit boxes in world history. The plot that Maro hatches is, in essence, a mini version of that scheme, one in which a staged decoy brawl is a crucial element.

To that end, she and Dalia involve a couple of men from the neighborhood in their plan: the white-haired errand runner Sunshine (Issam Bou Khaled), who seems haunted by regret, for reasons that eventually and movingly become clear, and water-truck driver Hamza (Hasan Akil), as much of a ticking time bomb as Sunshine is low-key and dependable. In deep money trouble with local mob boss Abu Rabih (Haytham Chamass), Hamza is all bristly nerves, always a hair’s breadth from falling apart, and, for the other characters and the audience alike, perhaps the riskiest element of the scheme.

As the quartet’s planning proceeds, complete with a Lego model of the bank premises, Hamza’s wrangling for a larger share of the haul is relentless. But the sisters’ tough resolve never flags. No smooth state-of-the-art romp, their vision deploys basic power tools, life-or-death desperation and unstoppable adrenaline. As the story moves breathlessly through the neighborhood’s streets and interiors, Kodeih, who also edited the feature, and cinematographer Tony Kopec zero in on a jumpy, kinetic tension between looming catastrophe and potential triumph.

Furies, whose producers’ roster includes not just Clooney and Grant Heslov but Rodrigo Teixeira (Call Me by Your Name, I’m Still Here), announces the arrival of a masterful storyteller. Kodeih has been making shorts for 20 years, and he has an assured way with high-energy action and a clear knack for working with actors.

His and Mariana’s screenplay takes its disparate characters to various forms of redemption but no easy answers. With its sardonic and snappy yet aching edge, the writing is attuned to the wider picture no less than the interpersonal, but even its more sweeping observations are rooted in character specifics, whether they concern the lingering animosities of civil war, the desperation of migrants, or the reverberations of one country’s strife on another’s bakery lines.

For all the characters, each word and gesture rings true. Nakouzi and Mroue hold the center with lived-in vibrancy as well as bone-deep exhaustion, often in the same breath. From their first scene together, in a car — a dynamic mashup of falafel and hashish and family memories — to a heart-stopping, late-in-the-action glance between them that’s no small nod to Thelma & Louise, every scene devoted to these two compelling performers is an absolute gem. How Maro and Dalia protect themselves from certain truths, how they protect each other in general, and how they face a world of crude and hellish injustice is the stuff that modern-day hero sagas are made of.