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Cinema has always had a way of opening unfamiliar places up to the world––if not always for a visit, then at least in the imaginations of those watching. The success of Georgian cinema in the last few years has come at a time when the country’s political future (and the possibility for that openness) seems up for grabs: on one side, a new generation leaning toward the West; on the other, a ruling party (improbably named Georgian Dream) attempting to buck the trend––and with an ally in the East willing to lend a hand. In the new film Panopticon, that fraught political moment is mirrored in a young man’s coming-of-age as he attempts to swim against the sexual, religious, and societal forces threatening to pull him under.

The story takes place in a village near Tbilisi, where the 18-year-old Sandro (Data Chachua) lives alone with his elderly grandmother,...

To begin with, Georgian writer-director George Sikharulidze’s debut feature places us mercilessly right into the last place on earth most of us would ever want to find ourselves: the lanky, concave frame and warped, self-loathing mindset of an incipient incel.

Eighteen-year-old Sandro (remarkable newcomer Data Chachua) is a creep: a surreptitious groper in public places, a gawky loner at the football club where he trains, and a sulky checked-out student in his final year of high school. But Sikharulidze’s clever screenplay soon deepens and complicates his characterization, making him quietly emblematic of the masculinity crisis being navigated by Georgia’s younger generation, in which modern, progressive values do battle with sexism, right-wing ideology and a strain of ancient religious hypocrisy that leaches like a toxin into the bloodstream of the body social. “Panopticon” may not have quite the all-seeing eye its title implies, but its gaze is piercing and sharp and strange.