Furies: Taking it Back
By Rohan Connolly
Rami Kodeih’s Furies (2026) asks how far one would go to get back what is rightfully theirs. The film celebrated its North American premiere this year at the Toronto International Film Festival and had audiences and critics alike glued to their seats. Taking place after the 2019 financial crisis in Lebanon wherein, as introduced in the film, “Lebanon’s economy collapsed after rampant political corruption. Overnight, banks stopped giving millions of people access to their own money. No one realized that this crisis would last for years, with ordinary people unable to retrieve their life savings.” Two sisters take matters into their own hands and decide to steal back their own savings from their local bank.
Maro (Rym Mroue) and Dalia (Maria Nakouzi) are sisters living in Beirut trying to make ends meet. Maro as a single mother and Dalia in need of a life-saving surgery due to an unnamed gynaecological issue. Despite the women having the funds to manage their lives, the bank refuses to release it to them as they do with the rest of their community. As time goes by, pocket money runs out, and desperation grows, the girls hatch a plan and loop in two unlikely community members to help them rob the bank. Drawing on the narrative conventions of heist films—marking the target, devising the plan, assembling the team, executing the job, the unexpected complication, and the aftermath—the film grounds its characters in reality, making for not just a fun heist film, but a portrait of how it feels to exist in a society entrenched in corruption and oppression. Furies imagines a world where the ordinary person can take on the system that exists to push them down at every opportunity, and win.
The film is a thrilling adventure with excellent comedic beats, fast-paced editing, and high stakes. However, what makes Furies truly one of a kind is the characters. At the heart of the film, lies the bond between Maro and Dalia: two sisters who would do anything for each other. Mroue and Nakouzi have incredible chemistry, the way they joke around, bicker, scheme, and ultimately care for each other is a perfect representation of sisterhood on screen. As the pressure of the heist builds, tension bubbles to the surface, each woman having a shorter temper with the other, but they continue to be there for each other despite it all. They are each other’s only hope at succeeding, at making it out of their current conditions. The love they hold for each other is what pushes them to succeed.
Furies, is the single story of two sisters, but it is indicative of so much more. Kodeih cites his own desperation as the inspiration for the film when he texted a friend: “Do I need to write a heist movie about me stealing my own money back?” Unlike other heist films, where the thief’s motive is one of vengeance, greed, or ego, the motives of the thieves in Furies are rooted in justice and reclamation. It is not the desperation of having nothing that drives these characters to rob the bank, but the knowledge that their own property is being kept from them. The characters know that they have the money to afford Dalia’s surgery, to keep the electricity on, to put food on the table, but it is being dangled in front of their faces and snatched away as soon as they reach out to grab it. It is the decision of the bank and those in power to force them into poverty and to become so distracted by trying to scrounge up spare change for dinner, that they forget about their savings, that they lose hope in accessing them, in finding a way out. Furies breathes hope into the lives led by Maro and Dalia. It is a reminder that those in power cannot truly take what is yours, that it can always be taken back.