Moon
The Austrian choreographer Florentina Holzinger is brilliant as a mixed martial arts trainer who is invited to work in Jordan in Kurdwin Ayub’s minimalistic and persuasive (if uneven) tale.
Image courtesy of Mubi.
The career of the Kurdish-Austrian writer/director Kurdwin Ayub has quickly taken off. She started out making documentaries including a feature length one but in 2022 she worked with actors on the film Sun (Sonne) which was acclaimed at the Berlin International Film Festival where it won the award for Best First Film. Its successor, Moon, a wholly distinct piece, has been even more successful having gained several awards including no less than three at the 2024 Locarno Film Festival. It is certainly a film that has a very individual character and its impact is much aided by the fact that its lead actress, Florentina Holzinger, has a very striking presence. Nevertheless, Moon eventually reveals itself as a film that plays out in two very different registers and does so in a way that that causes them to clash rather than yielding any real sense of a satisfactory whole.
Moon finds Holzinger in the role of Sarah Reisinger who, living in Vienna, has known success in the realm of mixed martial arts. However, we meet her at the moment when she loses an important contest and in addition a complaint is made against her in her coaching role. It now appears that her future is somewhat questionable, but that encourages her not to hesitate when she receives an unexpected invitation. She is contacted by Abdul (Omar Almajali) the son in a rich Jordanian family who wants her to travel to Jordan to instruct his three sisters who apparently find martial arts trendy and appealing. The job could last for a few months, will be well paid and will extend to being put up in a comfortable classy hotel. Sarah who has been sharing accommodation with her married sister, Beatrice (Tanja Ivankovic), knows little about Jordan and does not speak Arabic, but for her this offer has come at just the right moment.
For some two-thirds of its length Moon concentrates on this set-up which finds Sarah meeting the sisters – Nour (Andria Tayeh), Fatima (Celina Sarhan) and Shaima (Nagham Abu Baker) – and quickly realising that their interest in the sport is much less than she had been led to believe. She discovers too the degree of control which is imposed on the three girls and the constraints that are part of their way of life. The girls are said to have homeschooling, are prohibited from using Wi-Fi and would never be allowed to go out clubbing. As for Sarah herself, on arriving she has to sign a confidentiality agreement restricting her from taking any pictures or putting out comments on social media and she is told that the upstairs floor where the girls have their rooms is out of bounds to her. Sarah's work as their personal trainer is shown in some detail and we see her too in the hotel chatting to the barman and it’s here that she hears rumours that her rich employers are a bad family possibly even one with mafia connections.
These scenes are persuasively handled but, while Sarah herself seems somewhat naive and is taken aback by the ways of the house, viewers are unlikely to be surprised to learn that this prosperous Middle East household is one in which the absent patriarch holds the power and the daughters in particular are kept under tight control. Furthermore, the fact that Kurdwin Ayub’s screenplay adopts a decidedly minimal approach results in a film which for a long time explores this situation in such a quiet and repetitive way that the drama conveyed feels decidedly muted. That Moon nevertheless holds our interest is largely due to the ability of Florentina Holzinger to transfix us even when little is happening. Rather unexpectedly, I was reminded of the impact of Tessa Van den Broeck in 2024’s Julie Keeps Quiet in which her real-life abilities as a tennis player brought a compulsive sense of reality to her role as a fictional one. I doubt that Holzinger’s own background is echoed in her role here but the total conviction with which she portrays Sarah and her work processes possess an extraordinary inner conviction.
However, while her performance helps to keep us hooked for so long even when the minimalistic style of the piece keeps it rooted in the routines of the everyday life of its characters, the last third of Moon suddenly lurches into developments that are close to melodrama. In so far as it involves Sarah helping the girls to attempt to escape from their confinement it takes on some elements of a thriller. Nevertheless, it is short on the kind of plotting that would create sustained and intense excitement – and that’s so despite the switch in tone feeling too extreme for a work in which minimalism has up to that point defined its character. Furthermore, the film’s portrayal of women kept in subservience in the Middle East is one that is inherent throughout so the final scenes rather than building to a powerful climax merely reaffirm what has been apparent to us, if not necessarily to Sarah, from early on. Moon does end up back in Vienna but to involve Sarah in a club karaoke session and a song about S&M hardly rounds off the film in a meaningful way. I find myself questioning to some extent both the stylistic blend and what the film ultimately achieves (just compare it to the skill with which years ago the British filmmakers Basil Dearden and Michael Relph put across serious social comment within an effective thriller format in such works as Sapphire (1959) and Victim (1961) and did it so smoothly). Nevertheless, Moon is evidence of Kurdwin Ayub’s talent as a director while Florentina Holzinger’s achievement here is something special.
Original title: Mond.
MANSEL STIMPSON
Cast: Florentina Holzinger, Celina Sarhan, Andria Tayeh, Nagham Abu Baker, Omar Almajali, Tanja Ivankovic, Zayd Shilbaya, Ammar Odeh, Zainab Hussainy, Chanel Staele.
Dir Kurdwin Ayub, Pro Ulrich Seidl, Screenplay Kurdwin Ayub, Ph Klemens Hufnagl, Art Dir Karim Kheir, Ed Roland Stüttinger, Music Anthea Schranz, Costumes Carola Pizzini.
Ulrich Seidl Film Produktion GmbH-Mubi.
93 mins. Austria. 2024. UK Rel: 18 July 2025. Available on Mubi. No Cert.