- Released: February 12th, 2025
- Directed by: Mark de Cloe
- Running time: 1h 55min
- Rating 3.5/5
Synopsis
Teenage girls Ari and Zahra become best friends. But then the worst happens: Ari is diagnosed with terminal cancer and will soon die, and Zahra and her family might be deported back to Afghanistan.My Thoughts
Just a nice, heartfelt movie. Dutch movies generally tend to not be qualitatively the greatest (usually they just feel kinda cheap and badly acted), but this one was pretty solid. It does still clearly feel like a "not-so-high-budget" movie, but they made the most of what they had to work with.
The main draw for me in this movie is just the main characters and the emotional core to the story they present. Ari and Zahra are both well-written characters and their friendship just feels so real, making it all the more heartbreaking when we learn Ari is going to die and Zahra might not have a future in the Netherlands, having to leave behind everything she's ever known.
It's just a solid movie and the main characters play a big part in its quality. However, I wouldn't say it's perfect. For one, I do think that early on in the movie the friendship between Zahra and Ari does feel a big rushed. They just pretty much instantly hit it off once they meet and I don't know, it goes a little too fast for me. So fast that it didn't feel entirely realistic. I feel that if we had one or two extra scenes to show the girls getting to know one another and grow closer, their friendship probably wouldn't feel as rushed. They are well-written in the rest of the movie, but their meeting-to-friendship progression went a bit too fast.
Also the acting can be a bit, eh. It's not bad but you can tell that it isn't quite up to the same level of quality as some other movies. I do think that the girl who played Zahra did a very good job, and Ari is pretty good as well, but there are some moments where the acting from her or the other characters just isn't quite as good.
I also couldn't really get into the character of Ari's mother, she just came across as a bit plain and, I don't know, generic. Just like every other mother character in anything ever. Just a "generic sad parent" type of character. I'm not even really blaming it on the actress, she just wasn't given all that much material to work with.
It also does feel a bit ridiculous that the teens only seem to have a single teacher in high school. I get it, he's probably their mentor so he would be more involved, but that does come with the risk of making the movie feel almost ridiculously small-scale. If we even had one or two background teacher characters it would instantly make the movie's world feel more real, larger scale and lived in. Because literally outside of the mentor, and Ari and Zahra's class, it seems there is no other student or teacher at this high school, to the point it just felt cheap and unrealistic.
The ending was also just a tad rushed, again similar to the start of the movie. The conflict of "can Zahra and her family stay in the Netherlands?" is a major plot point throughout the movie, but then after Ari's death it's resolved really fast and, I don't know, after all that buildup it does go a bit fast and the movie ends pretty abruptly after. It's a nice and bittersweet ending of course (Ari dies, but Zahra is allowed to stay and becomes a doctor in the Netherlands), but it just goes by so fast and abruptly, it simply wasn't paced very well.
Overall I would consider this a pretty good movie and I do recommend it, however it does have its issues and just a bit of a cheapness to it that many Dutch productions have. Still I'd consider it pretty solid.
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