THE STORY – During Lebanon’s real-life corruption-fueled economic collapse, all the banks freeze accounts overnight, trapping millions of people’s life savings. Maro, a determined single mother, tries to access her own money to pay for her wild-hearted younger sister Dalia’s life-saving surgery. When the bank refuses, the sisters scheme an elaborate all-night heist to reclaim what is rightfully theirs. As they recruit an ex-militia member and truck driver into their plan, it triggers a chain of events that quickly spirals out of control in a city already on the brink.
THE CAST – Rym Mroue, Maria Nakouzi, Issam Bou Khaled & Hasan Akil
THE TEAM – Rami Kodeih (Director/Writer) & Nora Kodeih (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 133 Minutes
There is something wonderfully audacious about a heist movie in which the protagonists are not really stealing anything at all. In Rami Kodeih’s “Furies,” two sisters rob a bank to reclaim their own money, turning the absurd reality of Lebanon’s banking crisis into an electric crime thriller. Kodeih understands exactly what makes a great heist work: a plan convincing enough to inspire confidence and enough bad luck to destroy it. Careful preparation gives way to frantic improvisation, with every solution creating another problem. The suspense is phenomenal without sacrificing the humor, as terrible decisions swing from hilarious to genuinely frightening.
For a feature debut, it is remarkably assured. Energetic camera movement and sharp editing give “Furies” a restless momentum, while Beirut’s heat, crowds, and blackouts become part of its rhythm. Even the score, moving between Arabic club tracks and classical music, contributes to the exhilarating sense that everything could collapse at any second. At the center are sisters Maro (Rym Mroue) and Dalia (Maria Nakouzi), who find themselves planning an unusual bank robbery: the money they intend to steal already belongs to them. Against the backdrop of Lebanon’s economic collapse, their savings are trapped inside a banking system refusing depositors access to their own money. When Dalia needs surgery for her cancer, asking for it back eventually gives way to a more drastic solution – taking it themselves.
That premise is rooted in very real injustice and “Furies” channels its anger without allowing the politics to overwhelm the characters. Maro, a divorced single mother who has already lost her hairdressing business, is also struggling to maintain a relationship with her son. Dalia faces an altogether different uncertainty, continuing to live as freely as possible despite her diagnosis. The robbery provides the momentum, but the circumstances forcing them into it give the film its emotional and political weight. Rather than relying on lengthy exposition, the wider crisis is visible everywhere. Rolling blackouts leave people without reliable electricity, businesses have collapsed, and food rots in powerless refrigerators. Beirut feels hot, frustrated, and permanently on edge, its inhabitants seemingly improvising their way through another day. The absurdity of Maro and Dalia becoming criminals simply to retrieve their savings fits naturally into a world where the usual rules have stopped making much sense.
Holding all of this together is the relationship between the sisters. Mroue and Nakouzi share phenomenal chemistry, giving their bond the affection, irritation and shorthand of two people who know each other inside out. Maro initially appears to be the responsible one, worn down by motherhood and divorce, while Dalia is wilder, refusing to let cancer dictate how she lives. Those roles are never fixed: Maro can be just as reckless, while Dalia is often far more perceptive than she lets on.
Mroue beautifully captures the exhaustion beneath Maro’s toughness, while Nakouzi makes Dalia impulsive, funny, and fiercely alive rather than allowing illness to define her. They fight and frustrate each other endlessly, but the devotion beneath every argument is never in doubt. Equally refreshing is how naturally their experiences as women remain part of the action. Motherhood, divorce, illness, and bodily autonomy coexist with drills, disguises, and getaway vehicles rather than being pushed aside once the genre mechanics take over. At one point, uterine bleeding even becomes part of the operation, which might genuinely be a first for the heist genre.
The operation expands when Maro and Dalia recruit Sunshine (Issam Bou Khaled), an older man carrying the weight of his involvement with a Christian militia during the Lebanese Civil War, and Hamza (Hasan Akil), a truck driver with dangerous debts of his own. Neither inspire much confidence, adding further instability to a plan already hanging by a thread. Sunshine’s past also allows Lebanon’s history to run quietly beneath the immediate crisis. His involvement in the Civil War connects the desperation of the present to wounds carried from an earlier conflict, illustrating how political failures eventually reach into ordinary lives. A national banking crisis becomes a mother losing her business, a woman unable to pay for surgery and eventually, two sisters taking a sledgehammer to a wall.
Some of the film’s controlled chaos inevitably spills over. The first act takes a little time to put every piece into position, while Dalia’s illness occasionally feels like a convenient way of adding another ticking clock. The robbery itself requires a generous acceptance of coincidence and questionable decisions. Kodeih is not reinventing the mechanics of the heist movie so much as giving them an unusually urgent reason to exist.
The inevitable “Thelma & Louise” comparisons are well earned. “Furies” shares the thrill of watching women pushed to the edge find a strange kind of freedom in breaking the rules, with love rather than criminal ambition driving them forward. Here, however, that rebellion is inseparable from Lebanon’s political and economic reality, turning the outlaw fantasy into something angrier, more immediate, and entirely its own. That makes “Furies” a fantastic feature debut: angry, funny, and incredibly tense. Beneath its chaotic robbery is a deeply personal story about two sisters refusing to surrender to circumstances largely beyond their control. Kodeih understands the catharsis of watching ordinary people finally fight back, while Mroue and Nakouzi ensure the film never loses sight of what they are fighting for – and for whom.
