Two names represent "Moon", where the alarm signals blink red for the civic art consumer. The film was produced by young Austrian-Kurdish director Kurdwin Ayub with Ulrich Seidl, who plows and erodes Austria's spiritual landscape, crucifying religion, sexuality, and bigotry in such a way that one has a hard time distinguishing whether what is told or the teller is more uncomfortable.
The lead actress Florentina Holzinger, on the other hand, is famous and infamous as a theater maker, whose choreographed productions cause uproar and call ambulances to collect spectators who have become unwell. She has been invited to this year's Berliner Theatertreffen with her scandalous work based on Paul Hindemith's one-act opera "Sancta", which turns into a wild dance mass on female oppression and church dominance. The theme of serfdom, for which the artist forcefully gains entry into the dark districts of this world, also concerns "Moon", Ayub's follow-up film to her award-winning debut "Sun" (2022). The question of how teenagers find and assert their place occupies both stories.
In "Moon", there is a sense of impending doom. Sarah (Holzinger) is told by her sister, who has become a mother and leads a respectable married life, that she needs a business plan for her life. 20 years of martial arts, competitions, and physical training up to the pain threshold are behind her. Suddenly, a perspective opens up for her.
She is to get three sisters in shape as a personal trainer – in Jordan. Their brother Abdul Al Faradi has accommodated Sarah on the 28th floor of an elegant five-star hotel with a rooftop pool, from whose windows the panorama of Amman unfolds. She is picked up by a limousine and marvels at the palatial residence of the family on the outskirts of the city, where the desert begins. The first training session with Schaima, Fatima, and Nour has hardly begun when the girls interrupt her.
The parents, they say, are in Qatar, in fact they own houses in every country. Three princesses in a golden cage, isolated in luxury and idleness. They have tutors, chill or are occupied with fashion and their makeup. Wi-Fi is withheld from them. It seems like a kind of harem for higher daughters. Sarah feels more and more irritation about the activities in the house, the behavior of the three, and the supervision by the bodyguard. Rigid behavioral norms regulate the daily routine and the possibility of being together with outsiders.
The thriller, hardened by the reality of a paternalistically shaped Islamic culture, sneaks up on us in a way, is direct, harsh, and dirty, while the camera sticks closely to the heels of the characters. Sarah sees traces of violence on Fatima's face, who claims they are the effects of a Botox injection. And she makes the discovery that there is a fourth sister, Aya, the oldest, who is kept under wraps, bound to her bed in her desert-torn room and punished with beatings, and who burns herself in an act of self-mutilation in the kitchen and dies. Brother Abdul wants to portray Aya as a case of schizophrenia.
Martial arts training as conditioning and empowerment in a physical sense, which impacts the mental, seems to bear fruit. The sisters plan the escape. Sarah supports the escape from the family prison, but the attempt fails. Sarah gets away.
Rescue is not granted. Not to the viewer as a pleasant feeling that something has turned for the better, and especially not to the Western European Sarah, as the remaining two scenes and situations at the end show. What is wrong with the young woman: numbness, resignation, despair, guilt, self-justification? "Feels good to be bad," she sings in a club and celebrates the thrill of BDSM rituals, as if the boundary between consent and overpowering external violence is a gray area. East meets West – and no one benefits from it.
