Stars: Zain Al Rafeea, Yardonas Shiferaw, Boluwatife Treasure Bankole, Kawthar Al Haddad, Fadi Kamel Youssef
Director: Nadine Labaki
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Foreign Language Film-Lebanon)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 1/5 stars
(Spoilers Ahead) Zain (Al Rafeea) is a young man currently serving a prison sentence despite being 12 for stabbing a man. We don't know at the time why Zain stabbed the man, though we'll get there, but we do know that Zain is suing his parents for "letting him be born." We also learn at the time that an Ethiopian woman named Rahil (Shiferaw) is being processed as an immigrant, and the two are somehow connected. The film then flashes back and we learn about both of their lives. Zain lives in squalor with abusive parents, a mother who is a drug dealer and a father who is absent & abusive. He wants to run away with his sister Sahar, but Sahar (despite being at best 13 or 14) is married off to their creepy adult landlord before he can escape with her (we later learn that she died during a pregnancy), and so he runs away alone, finding an amusement park and a life babysitting for Rahil's son while she works. Rahil is offered an extension on her papers if she sells her infant son (so he can be adopted), but she refuses, and is eventually arrested with Zain & Rahil left to fend for themselves. Eventually he is conned by the same man who wanted to buy Rahil's baby, and in an attempt to flee to Sweden, he realizes that Sahar died during pregnancy (and his parents seemingly don't care), and he stabs the landlord who married her. The film ends on a happy note after so much suffering, with Zain suing his parents for their neglect, and the man who took Rahil's baby being caught, reuniting the two.
The film is depressing, and so I want to get to the good before I get to the bad. The movie is well-lensed, particularly the juxtaposition between something people enjoy (an amusement park) and the shabbier angles that we get from Zain's perspective as someone who can't afford to see it as a place of enjoyment, and instead as a spot to escape. Al Rafeea is very good in the lead role, a child performance that carries the film in the hardest of moments, even when it's frustrating, filling his character in ways that are knowing but also as informed as a 12-year-old child could actually get (there's no lazy writing reliance on "he's precocious" as way to relate his actions to the grown-up audience watching the picture).
But man is this film bleak, and not in a way that feels drawn from realism (though it's hard not to imagine that life for the real-world Zain's and Rahil's isn't this challenging), but the movie starts to feel exploitive of our emotions in order to carry across the plot, frequently making life as brutal for Zain & Rahil as possible without any narrative reason. Watching a fictional child and mother tortured for two hours isn't by definition "good cinema;" we should not confuse relentless struggle with being a compelling dramatic narrative. Just because it's realistic doesn't mean that it's a good movie, and Capernaum is a movie that falls wholly into the camp of "let's make everything as horrible as possible to get accolades" while also indulging two-dimensional caricatures from pretty much everyone other than Zain, and letting the writing fall into predictable patterns. This is almost certainly a movie that will make you feel (it certainly should make you feel-if you don't, you might want your heart checked out), but it's also a movie that feels exploitive rather than engaging, using the struggles of Zain & Rahil as a patch for a poorly-designed script than as something we should try to fix in our real world.
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