Critics reviews

It’s easy to imagine the Hollywood version of this story, with a heroic escape orchestrated by Sarah. But Moon is gripping in its own understated way as it presents the unvarnished reality: that standing up to injustice is harder than it looks in the movies.

You can see how Ayub still has plenty of room to grow as a storyteller, but she is getting better at her craft with each project.

Cages, no matter where they are, constitute the underlying theme of Ayub’s screenplay. She explores the physical and metaphorical cages a person might want to leave and the ones they might wish to return to.

While the film occasionally indulges in some clichés... Mond remains a taut, politically charged thriller that offers a powerful and nuanced exploration of sisterhood and self-determination.

The Arab world here is projected as purely oppressive and by the final frame Sarah, the white outsider, is ultimately reimagined as a savior speeding to the rescue. It’s an unfortunate slip up by Ayub. In trying to land a sharp emotional gut punch on the audience, she squanders the provocative body blows that got us to this point.

Caged women, both mentally and physically, are the subject of Iraqi-born Austrian filmmaker Kurdwin Ayub’s sophomore narrative feature, Moon, which expertly exemplifies this frustrating struggle to flee an enclosure even when opportunities present themselves to do so.

Moon... is equally riveting [as Sonne] due to its unpredictable, genre-leaning suspense thriller format, but it is a more sensationalist and superficial take on family pressures, displacement, and self-actualisation, with few of the cultural nuances and detail that made her debut so rich.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, coming so shortly after Ayub’s first feature, this second effort feels undercooked, but it’s still intriguing owing to its tension-escalating narrative and its orientation towards a wider audience thanks to its straightforward, thriller-like plot.

A disquieting drama in which it seems Ayub, in what we can consider a spiritual companion to her previous film Sun, is telling a story that blends social commentary, cultural discourse and issues around contemporary femininity to create an off-kilter work that challenges and provokes in ways that are difficult to anticipate, and proves to be genuinely surprising in how it crafts something truly unforgettable from the fabric of a story that would otherwise be seen as far too heavy-handed to have any lasting impact.