There's a specific kind of diaspora film where the city does all the heavy lifting and the characters stumble through it like tourists who happen to share its blood. Shadows of Beirut lands squarely in that territory — Beirut itself, with its ruined housing stock, anarchic traffic, and layered grief, is the most fully realised thing on screen. The human drama surrounding it is messier, and not always in the intended way. Lana (Tala Calil, also co-writer and producer) left Beirut 25 years ago and returns to reckon with a dying father whose alcoholism and violence she fled. She brings with her a London boyfriend, a rocky relationship, and a severe OCD that has her doubling up N95s with full-face plastic shields. The film is admirably specific about the texture of the condition — the gear, the panic attacks, the hypervigilance — and then it makes the somewhat convenient choice of having Beirut cure her of most of it by proximity to family. That trade is where the drama is thinnest: the healing feels earned by the city, not by the character work. Director Tina Gharavi shot partly on location in Beirut and partly on Bulgarian studio sets, during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the seams show in the editing. The cut is relentless — frenetic crosscutting, abrupt transitions, a perpetual sense of motion that could read as a formal choice (Lana's fractured mental state, the city's chaos) or simply as a production that couldn't always control its continuity. Probably some of both. What saves the rhythm is that Beirut actually is this chaotic: there's a scene where Lana's new friend Sirine (Flavia Bechara) hands over the wheel mid-drive to remove her coat, and it plays as completely believable, because traffic lights in Beirut are apparently advisory documents. The cast is split between English and Arabic, and the film is noticeably better in Arabic. The English-language scenes carry stiff line readings that suggest the actors haven't fully inhabited the material, whereas the Arabic sequences unlock something lived-in and specific. A standout scene has Rami's (Assaad Bouab) haughty wife dismantling him with a stream of invective in front of a room full of relatives — it's the film's most dramatically confident moment, and it's entirely in the margins of the main plot. Bouab himself does solid work as the cousin who bridges Lana's past and present. The Covid setting is mostly texture — PPE as character costume — rather than a structural element of the drama. That's a slight waste of what was genuinely strange and specific historical material. The pandemic context would have been more interesting if it had complicated the reunion rather than simply providing Lana's reason for wearing a lot of masks. As it stands, the family secrets that Lana eventually uncovers feel like they arrive late and in a hurry, the plot resolving what the film had been building toward without quite earning the emotional weight it wants. Shadows of Beirut is a film you watch for its edges: the city itself, the Arabic-language performances, the micro-moments around the main action. The centre — Lana's healing arc and father confrontation — is overwrought in the way that projects with too much personal investment sometimes are. Calil's tri-role as actor, co-writer, and producer likely made it impossible for anyone to push back hard enough on the script's more schematic moments. The result is a film that loves Beirut more than it understands its protagonist.
