The title is poisonously ironic: living on the front line in a war beamed into a billion homes, a Palestinian household is further stripped bare when an a group of Israeli soldiers take over their house for use as an observation post. Concerned for her children, the mother (Arin Omary) wants to leave and go somewhere safer; the father (Mohammad Bakri), however, demands that the family stay as a matter of principle. Confined to a single room night after night, and with no recourse to any authority figure, the tension and terror mount even as both parties come to a grudging endurance of the status quo. In deploying Jewish and Arabic actors in the main roles and affording each a measure of helpless vulnerability, Italian director Saverio Costanzo takes pains to avoid apportioning blame to either side in the Middle East conflict. But what might have become a watered-down plea for tolerance and respect is instead a compelling humanisation of a war few outside of the occupied territories understand, let alone feel any empathy with. Saverio employs a variety of methods to convey the stifling, claustrophobic atmosphere of a house that functions as a metaphor for its setting: a hand-held camera that peeks through windows, up stairs and through cracks in doors; naturalistic lighting courtesy of night-vision goggles, gritty daylight, the reflection from a TV screen and the flame of a Zippo lighter; a subtly overlapping soundtrack in which sounds from upstairs and outside filter through the family's personal discourse. While the script strains too hard at times to establish similarities between Israeli and Palestinian, the performances are virtually flawless and no pat resolutions are offered at the end. Instead there is a brutal cut-off in the stomach-churning escalation in tension that points up the pointlessness of cyclical violence in a stalemate engineered by diametrically opposed forces. This story ends where the news bulletins begin.
