Mond

This film was screened in competition at the Warsaw Film festival and despite working with the cliche of a washed up boxer and middle eastern Families who hide their wayward daughters in the attic, MOON still manages to compel your attention for the first 70 minutes of the film.

Sarah, the young woman who finds herself unemployed after losing her last martial art fight, is played with an authenticity that is riveting and you just can not take your eyes off her every unpredictable move.

Florintina Holinger plays Sarah with a nose that looks broken from certain angles and her physical energy masks her psychological trauma from her unhappy life. When she meets four broken Jordan princesses, Sarah struggles to connect and do her job which is to teach them self defense.

If only the filmmaker Kurdein Ayub had trusted her ability to create interesting female characters, we might have had a truly unusual film. If the girls had all made different decisions, we could have watched a slow burn. Instead, we have a frenetic last 15 minutes of the film which betrays the slow suspenseful character development of the first three acts.

Sometimes it is ok to have a slow resolution to the story and I think if she can, Ayub should think about recutting the film with a different outcome.

As it is, the story suddenly ends and we feel like act 4 is just there to resolve the plot, not really to add to the reality of the women Involved.