Toronto 2026 Review: FURIES, A Feverishly Hellish Heist By Women Scorned
What is the world coming to when you have to steal your own hard earned money?
Dalia is in need of a significant surgery. Until then, her medicine is only available on the black market, where half of it is counterfeit, and all of it is expensive.
Maro has lost custody of her young son after her salon business went under due to lack of funds. The two sisters have been living on top of each other in Dalia’s cramped apartment, with Maro doing hair and beauty appointments on the balcony in the sweltering heat in between short visits with her boy for only a few hours on weekends.
Beirut in 2023 was hell. A few years after a massive harbour explosion, an ongoing currency crisis continued to freeze people out of their own life savings, which became trapped inside their own banking institutions on government orders until the Lebanese Pound stabilized. The Ukraine-Russian war was causing grain deliveries to be delayed or halted to the city, adding food scarcity to multiple crises. Businesses failed and people's lives were unravelling, with society on the brink of something dire.
After doing all the requisite paperwork to convince the bank and government bureaucracy to release some of their frozen funds for their increasingly desperate predicaments, Maro can only watch the branch manager enthusiastically chomp down on an expensive salad, while offering indifferent excuses between bites. Outside she sees a local politician easily procure an envelope thick with bank notes from the same manager.
An unbearably hot, Do the Right Thing kind of summer in this pressure-cooker time and place is a helluva setting for deeply unconventional heist movie. It's one in which two desperate sisters conspire to rob their own bank to get their own money in their own hands.
Gathering up their ‘team’ consisting of a truck driver who is in a lot of trouble (and debt) with local criminals, and an ex-militia recovered alcoholic, they have scoped out the locations, built a not-at-all-to-scale model constructed from lego-blocks, and crafted a plan involving kidnapping and demolitions and a pre-dawn getaway before the bakery next door opens for business. The sisters, ordinary folks who have never doing anything of this nature, do not even qualify for the title of amateur, are balancing cluttered, complicated lives to boot.
Furies flirts with all the doomed energy of a Thelma & Louise trajectory, while delivering an inventive (surprisingly action-heavy) original outcome. It does so without ever undercutting Maria Nakouzi and Rym Mroue’s nuanced performances with cheap or convenient spectacle.
The debut feature from Rami Kodeih is a feverishly propulsive, character-focused heist flick shot in a guerrilla style that recalls the early work of the Safdie Brothers (Good Time) or Nicolas Winding Refn’s Pusher trilogy. Heightened with tightly cluttered mise-en-scene, Furies remains grounded in urban neighbourhood truths.
Much of the nuts and bolts of the genre are here, only with ambitions well beyond, Kodeih provides a fair bit of extra runway, before and after “the job,” to distinguish the film from being just a genre exercise. The situation is specific enough to defy any temptation of remakes, Hollywood or otherwise.
Superb editing here cuts to the rhythms of the noise, percussion, and chaos in dense urban spaces. The centre set-piece, involving the two men creating a major street distraction while the ladies sledge their way through the inside wall, is the kind of hold-your-breath level stuff that the best of this type of film (from Rafifi to Widows) can pull off. Complications, double crosses, and daycare are all present.
Co-written with his wife Nora Mariana, Furies was born out of their real-life predicament when they needed money for her surgery, which the bank refused to grant at the time. The frustration of this situation provided the inspiration, if I had to guess, partially borne of exasperated, comically powerless rage. This has yielded an extreme fictional version, something meant for the big screen, and executed with a technical flair that never undermines the drama of circumstance. It enhances it with a clock-ticking intensity.
The Beirut social milieu has a way of creeping back into the story that further tightens the screws, providing unconventional endings and no easy solutions. Life goes on, messy and unpredictable, and there are certainly no guarantees of anything. And yet, somehow, Kodeih and Mariana have crafted a crowd-pleasing hybrid for the 21st century, one that seems astonishing yet strangely inevitable.
