Writer and Director: Kurdwin Ayub
The first two-thirds of this film, directed by Iraqi-born Austrian Kurdwin Ayub, runs like an entertaining and modern rewrite of Jane Eyre. A troubled young woman is hired to teach girls in a house that is far away from home. Within days she senses that something isn’t quite right and that someone is hidden upstairs. The last third of Moon, receiving its UK premiere at WatchAUT, is less predictable and satisfyingly leaves more questions than answers.
Performance artist Florentina Holzinger, whose bloody reinterpretation of Paul Hindesmith’s opera Sancta Susanna caused some members of the audience to request medical treatment in Stuttgart last year, is mesmerising as the sullen ex-MMA champion now reluctantly forging a career in personal training. Sarah applies for a job teaching martial arts to three sisters in Jordan because Austria offers her nothing.
The sisters’ brother, Abdul, is the nearest we get to a Mr Rochester. He is bright and friendly, generously putting Sarah up in a suite in a fancy Amman hotel from which a driver picks her up daily to transport her to the girls’ mansion on the edges of the city. Everything is running smoothly until she is requested to sign NDAs and promises not to mention anything that occurs in the house.
The teenage girls are not allowed mobile phones, and there is no Wi-Fi in the house. One of the sisters complains of a pain in her side while the youngest appears at a training session with bruises on her face. Sarah is told that she must never go upstairs.
The narrative may lean towards the Gothic, but Ayub never utilises horror tropes. There is no score in the background to accentuate the mystery, so the booming techno of an underground club comes as a shock, the nearest jump-scare on offer, perhaps. Ayub’s camera work is economical, never lingering too long on any clue. Holzinger’s face remains inscrutable, although we always sense her repressed energy could return in the blink of an eye.
And it is this potential for action that drives the film’s last part: when and should Sarah act. If she were to intervene, would her judgements be based on what is right or what the West conceives as right? She has no one with which to discuss this dilemma as she’s a lonely figure and the other people she meets in Amman stick closely to the rules of the culture. We are never quite sure of her decision.
Possibly, the answer lies in the scene when Sarah performs karaoke in a bar. However, it’s a scene that doesn’t quite work, and after Saltburn’s Murder on the Dancefloor, these musical shorthands for emotional states are already too familiar. However, the final shot works beautifully and Sarah is as unknowable as ever.
Moon is screening at the 3rd watchAUT Austrian Film Festival from 13-16 March.
The Reviews Hub Score
Modern Gothic
