Sisters Maro (Rym Mroue) and Dalia (Maria Nakouzi) are two broke girls in a fucked-up country with no options, one of them says. It’s 2022, Spring in Beirut, and three years into a nationwide economic collapse in Lebanon, where banks have put an embargo on people withdrawing their own money. And so the sisters hatch a harebrained, implausible, but just-might-work plan to breach the bank’s walls, take back their money, and get the hell out of dodge.
Director Rami Kodeih, co-writing the script with Nora Mariana, directs the hell out of his third feature, “Furies,” a heist thriller with the electric intensity and sprawling international vibe of movies like Mexican director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s “Amores Perros” or Brazilian filmmaker Fernando Meirelles’s “City of God.” But with a “Thelma and Louise” touch, as Dalia, a sex worker riddled with worsening cancer, and Maro, a hairdresser with a small son and mostly absent ex-boyfriend/father, set on a path to ride out into the sunset with cash in hand. But the problem, as “Furies” eventually arrives at in its melancholy what-now finish, is how many people on a national scale they will fuck over in the process.
Holding their accounts on freeze like a fortress are smarmy bank managers who laugh in the face of Beirut citizens who attempt a demand on their own funds. Meanwhile, electricity is being shut off due to unpaid bills, and there’s panic in the streets. Kodeih and cinematography Tony Kopec immerse you in the hell and sometimes pleasurably hedonistic chaos of life in the city. Maro works a bar by night, where Dalia appears to turn tricks. But we soon realize that the tablet she takes in the morning isn’t a morning-after pill. The walls are closing in.
After a failed attempt via brandishing documents with proof her own funds to said one of those unamused bank heads, Maro runs into a sexy concierge who lives next door to the bank. She figures out that he has a stud wall that leads straight into the bank. After studying the ins and outs of a 1976 Beirut bank heist where guerrillas ran off with more than $20 million cash, Maro figures, why not us? The men she enlists are hardly hardened criminals. There’s Hamza (Hasan Akil), a truck driver who’s not the brightest bulb in the basket but has an anger in him, and Sunshine (Issam Bou Khaled), a kindly former Christian militia member just trying to get through the day. The promise of $80,000 sounds like a lot. And so they set to work on a crazed plan with no guarantee.
It’s spellbinding to watch Kodeih throw every trick in his arsenal, with homages to “The Wages of Fear” and its own remake “Sorcerer,” as the foursome close in on the bank. How, for example, will they drill through the bank’s walls in the dead of night without a soul detecting? Sunshine and Hamza stage a streetside scuffle that escalates beyond expectations. And Maro and Dalia, who are a dynamic duo prone to gossiping and getting stoned, suddenly find themselves more willing than they realized to do terrible deeds for their own advancement.
The beats are familiar, the story formulaic, but the filmmaking is kinetic and alive, worthy of the largest possible audience. George Clooney stepped in as an executive producer, but my understanding is that his role was more to get out of the way of serious filmmaking to support it, rather than to intervene creatively. With the goal of smuggling themselves to Turkey, the women are eventually found out for keeping a secret or two from the conspirators abetting their plan. It’s the moral complexity that makes “Furies” tick. The women’s motivations can be confounding. You know where the story is heading. But this is, indeed, furious filmmaking.
Grade: B
“Furies” premiered at the 2026 Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
