Angel Studio’s Newest Turns the Migrant Disaster Into Digestible Thriller

Scholarly proof now attributes a three-page part of the play Sir Thomas Extra (1591-93) to William Shakespeare. If true, its protected to say the Elizabethan poet was a fierce defender of immigrant rights; or, on the very least, had empathy for so-called “strangers” searching for a greater life, in a brand new place. I Was A Stranger, a five-part, neorealist drama set throughout the top of the Syrian civil warfare, in 2015, begins with Shakespeare’s impassioned speech to a gaggle of braying rioters, demanding the bigots see themselves within the footwear of the stranger with “infants at their backs and their poor baggage.” Do you think about you would be handled any otherwise, Shakespeare appears to ask, if you have been a stranger in one other land?

Author-director Brandt Andersen has his coronary heart in the fitting place, however the inclusion of Shakespeare’s forgotten phrases is an unlucky harbinger for a movie whose western gaze is obvious from the get. Fractured as it’s in Pulp Fiction-like chronology, and at solely 97 minutes, I Was a Stranger is packaged and bought with a competition viewers in thoughts.

It is an odd method. In some methods, I Was a Stranger is harking back to Agnieszka Holland’s Inexperienced Border, which depicted, in uncooked element, the expertise of Ukrainian refugees on the Polish border. However Holland’s movie roughly sticks with one storyline, giving us intimate entry to the on-the-ground challenges of leaving one place in haste and, maybe, much more difficult, being accepted someplace new. As a result of Andersen would not allow us to sit with anybody perspective for longer than about fifteen minutes, we’re caught at arm’s size.

I Was a Stranger Too Usually Feels Like an Motion Epic

Informed in reverse chronological order, the movie begins in Chicago in April 2023 with a conspicuous crane shot approaching Trump Tower. However Andersen brings right into a hospital the place Physician Amira Homsi (Yasmine Al Massri, who offers a star flip in Palestine ’36) is clocking in and is, seemingly, shocked to understand it’s her birthday. The movie instantly flashes again to 2015, when Amira is desperately attempting to carry down an ER in Aleppo, treating a bleeding-out teenager and a gunshot-wounded soldier on the similar time; the latter threatens her at gunpoint to cease treating “the enemy.” On the similar time, bombs rain down relentlessly mere ft away.

Nonetheless, Amira will get out of her shift in a single piece and heads residence for a household birthday celebration, proper earlier than a bomb tears by the lounge ceiling. Amira and her daughter Rasha (Massa Daoud) survive, however the remainder of the household doesn’t, and the 2 of them discover themselves within the trunk of a automotive in a mad sprint to be smuggled out of the battle. The movie then cuts to Mustafa’s POV (Yahya Nagayni), the soldier who had informed Amira within the ER ready room that treating the enemy makes her the enemy.

It seems Mustafa is the son of an notorious resistance fighter, although how he grew to become a loyal soldier for Bashar al-Assad is as but unclear. Mustafa looks as if a fairly unflappable fellow till he witnesses his superior make a number of choices to homicide youngsters at point-blank vary, and is confronted with a quandary to both assist Amira escape or else shoot his boss. However, like each previous section, Andersen cuts earlier than the decisive second.

Subsequent up is Omar Sy (Netflix’s Lupin), who performs Marwan, the movie’s most bizarrely complicated character. Sy would be the movie’s most recognizable face, however he’s cartoonishly evil right here in some scenes after which cartoonishly candy in others. A smuggler in Turkey taking reprehensible ranges of benefit over enthusiastic would-be migrants, Marwan additionally cares for his in poor health little one Yusuf (Baeyen Hoffman) with tenderness as they each fantasize about consuming deep dish pizza in Chicago. Everyone seems to be difficult, I assume, however Marwan would not make a ton of sense, particularly since he and his son are each French, but communicate in English whereas dwelling in Turkey.

Andersen then reveals us the temporary journey of Fathi (Ziad Bakri), Amira’s brother, who’s caught on the lifeboat that Marwan has organized, within the movie’s shortest and, oddly, most expendable part. Nothing is discovered right here, actually, after which Andersen brings us to Greece, the place battle-weary Captain Stavros (Constantine Markoulakis) struggles to maintain up spirits whereas on an unceasing mission to save lots of as many migrants as he can. Within the movie’s most morally doubtful scene, Stavros, his colleagues and household placed on airs of false humility whereas scoreboarding the overall variety of lives he has saved. White saviorism in actual time.

Andersen has lengthy been a passionate activist for immigrant rights; he has personally flown support packages over Gaza, has run filmmaking camps for displaced folks all around the world, and operates a basis known as REEL which helps immigrants use artwork as an outlet. Regardless of him being white and American, it is not as if he involves this materials with inexperienced eyes and ears, but nonetheless, the film feels hole. The characters’ one dimensionality is one factor, however its additionally irritating that the movie makes no try and contextualize this second, a choice which simply characterizes center japanese battle as generalized and othered.

At its greatest, I Was a Stranger dramatizes the desperation of migrancy in ways in which complicate right-wing narratives of cheapskate criminality, however more often than not the film dips into trauma porn. It is not troublesome to think about the rich cinema-goer that in any other case spends little time pondering of immigrants, now in a position to stroll out of the theater patting themselves on the again for having a coronary heart. However the film would not interrogate the precise perpetrators of violence nor the methods which have lit the powder keg for the migrant disaster to exist, nor does it do a lot to assist us perceive these folks on any actual, susceptible degree. As an motion film, it really works alright — however I am positive Andersen would agree his topic deserves extra worth than as leisure.

I Was a Stranger releases theatrically on January ninth, 2026.