Picked by: John Why: An Instagram reel of a Korean director making the case that if you only watch movies in your own language you’ll miss a long list of masterpieces. John took a screenshot of the films that flashed across the screen, forgot about it, scrolled back through his phone, and found Incendies. Went in knowing almost nothing. Didn’t even remember it was in French.
The Conversation
John opened by describing it as the kind of movie where the directing and acting carried him through the parts where he couldn’t have told you what the plot was. He praised Denis Villeneuve’s close-up technique — extended shots of a character’s face while someone else is talking off-screen, just watching the reaction — and said that without that discipline an hour in he might have bailed. He didn’t bail. He gave it a 90, his third in that tier and a score he put alongside Dead Ringers as a film that’s hard to explain liking as much as he does.
Sean watched it with Jenna, who’d already had the entire plot condensed into a TikTok and knew the twist. She kept quiet throughout. Sean confirmed there were zero spoilers, that he got to experience the full gut punch of the reveal in real time, and that the film gets noticeably better in retrospect once you know the twist and start to see how everything was quietly laid in. He specifically called out the assassination scene — Villeneuve’s camera following the mother from directly behind as she walks toward her target — as the kind of controlled filmmaking that marks a director finding his voice. He also noted that the actress playing Nawal as an old woman was 30 years old with makeup, which impressed everyone once it came up.
Sam focused less on the twist and more on the mother’s arc as the thing that actually held the film together. He thought the reveal — that the prison guard who raped Nawal was her own son, Nihad, whom she’d lost at age five when their shelter was bombed and who had been radicalized into a child soldier and eventually a warlord — was a little operatic as a plot mechanism, plausible on a stage but slightly theatrical on film. He said so, then immediately walked it back a little, because he acknowledged it all technically tracks, and that Villeneuve’s deliberate misdirection of the timeline (the child soldier head-shaving in the very first scene appears to be the villain’s origin story, but it’s actually Nihad at age five being taken in) earns some credit even if it requires the audience not to do the math until the movie wants them to. Sam called the bus ambush scene the film’s tension peak — the one moment where physical dread overtook everything else — and flagged the way the film depicts sectarian violence: Christian nationalist militia as the explicit on-screen aggressors, the Muslim warlord’s violence shown only through smoldering remains of an orphanage after the fact. He found it interesting, not didactic, and connected it to what he described as a broader truth about how religious violence rarely looks like how the West frames it.
Sean drew the Zulu comparison — another film that dropped the group into a conflict most of them had never spent much time thinking about, and trusted them to find their footing in it. Sam pointed out that the film's setting is a fictional country (Duresh) but the bones are Lebanese civil war, the Palestinian refugee camps pushed into Lebanon, the layered sectarian factions. The playwright who wrote the source material fled a war-torn country to France or Canada — John had read this in a YouTube comment and was confident enough in it to say it out loud.A few other things that landed: the two letters Nawal leaves behind, one addressed to her son-as-rapist (“fuck you”) and one to her son-as-brother (“I will always love you”); the pool scene, where Nawal recognizes Nihad by an ankle tattoo, walks toward him thinking she’s finally found her firstborn, and he turns around and she understands in one beat that they are the same person; and John’s read of the ending — that the twins don’t respond with hatred toward Nihad because he was raised a monster but wasn’t born one, same as they were born from a monster but became decent people. Sam was the one who needed the “one plus one makes one” math explained to him in real time. He accepted this as a fair characterization.
The brother Simon was collectively described as a sniveling doofus for the first half, which everyone agreed was the correct read, and also eventually earned.
The Verdict
John 90, Sam 88, Sean 88, average 89 — the highest score in Tough Flicks history. The previous record was 85, held jointly by They Live, Dead Ringers, and Cure. John’s reaction when he tallied it: “We’ve officially peaked.” Sean’s: “Good work, John.”