Pip: The Last Movie Guy has been watching films where the emotional damage is structural — built into the cinematography, the desert, the heist plan itself.

Mara: Hugo Pagan Soto covers three films this week, moving through teenage trauma and adolescence, a father-daughter estrangement set against actual sand, and a Lebanon-rooted survival story that turns into a robbery. Let's start with the one that gets closest — literally — to its subject.

Teenage trauma and adolescence

Pip: The question with films about adolescent pain is whether they observe suffering or actually inhabit it — and 17, directed by Kosara Mitić, is staking a claim for the second category.

Mara: The review describes the camera's method precisely: "The camera seems to breathe alongside her, absorbing every gesture, every silence, and even the faintest heartbeat of her anguish."

Pip: So the upshot is that the handheld, extreme close-up approach isn't a stylistic choice so much as a philosophical one — you're not watching Sara, you're occupying her.

Mara: And that proximity is deliberately disorienting. The review notes that at first viewers question Sara's decisions and grow angry at her actions — empathy arrives late, as the full picture assembles.

Pip: Which is a structurally honest way to depict trauma. You don't get the context first; you get the wound.

Mara: The film also extends beyond Sara's inner world. Mitić examines the toxic dynamics within male groups — power, abuse, and shame as tools for silencing victims. That social layer runs alongside the personal one.

Pip: And carrying all of it is Eva Kostić, a non-professional actor in her cinematic debut. Mitić specifically sought someone without professional training to embody Sara — and apparently found someone extraordinary.

Mara: The review calls her performance "visceral" and says the final sequence is "a moment of tremendous intensity that shakes us and drags us, inevitably, into Sara's inner hell." This is also North Macedonia's submission for the International Feature Film Oscar.

Pip: A debut director, a debut lead, and a five-star review. Pressure's on everyone else now.

Mara: The emotional weight here connects to something we see differently framed in the next film — estrangement not in a school trip but across a generation.

Family estrangement in the desert

Pip: The Beloved asks what happens when a father and daughter are forced into physical proximity by a film shoot while an emotional desert stretches between them.

Mara: Rodrigo Sorogoyen uses metacinema to make that gap visible. The review puts it plainly: "the production in the desert becomes a way of revealing what father and daughter cannot say to each other directly."

Pip: So the film-within-a-film isn't a clever device — it's the only available language between them.

Mara: Javier Bardem plays a successful director, Victoria Luengo his actress daughter, and the dynamic doubles: despotic director on set, manipulative father off it. The desert setting mirrors Spain's historical abandonment of the Sahara in the 1930s, which Sorogoyen explicitly parallels to the father-daughter relationship.

Pip: Abandonment as a theme, literal and national. That's doing a lot of work quietly.

Mara: The film earns five stars. When survival is urgent enough, people rob banks — which is where we go next.

Survival amid crisis and heists

Pip: Furies is set in Lebanon in 2022, when the financial collapse was total — savings frozen, banks inaccessible — and one woman's medical crisis becomes the ignition point for a robbery.

Mara: The screenplay follows heist conventions deliberately, but the premise is specific: "Maro and Dalia simply want to recover their own money to pay for Dalia's medical procedure." That premise is rooted in the personal experience of co-writers Nora Mariana and Rami Kodeih.

Pip: Recovering your own money is not usually how we frame crime. The system has to fail pretty comprehensively before that sentence makes sense.

Mara: The film draws structural comparisons to Rififi and The Killing — anticipation, precision, the volatility of everyone involved. It also invokes Thelma and Louise: women operating outside the law, institutions and men standing in their way.

Pip: Genre filmmaking with a country's grief packed inside it.

Mara: The review calls it "a powerful social critique" where every obstacle Maro and Dalia hit "represents the pain of an entire nation." Four stars, with praise for the cinematography, editing, and sustained tension throughout.

Pip: Three films, three different containers for the same basic question — how do people survive what's been done to them, or done to their country.

Mara: And all three find the answer somewhere in proximity — a camera that breathes, a desert that reflects, a bank vault that holds what was already yours. More to come.