This setup is simple, but what follows is less so: an impressionistic battle between imagination and brute force that too often veers from enlightening to exasperating.
Suliman (“Paradise Now,” “The Attack”) dominates the screen as Khaled, utterly compelling in and out of jail, his magnificent perf tying up cinematic loose ends.
Habie’s fractured narrative style—particularly her arbitrary shifts from Khaled’s perspective to Eyal’s to (apparently) third-person reality—stymies the accumulation of any dramatic momentum from scene to scene.
Using its narrative as a launching pad for abstract visuals, the picture reminds viewers that even the most striking images demand context to create anything like drama.