Cuts are sharper than expected in the clumsy Palestinian thriller Huda’s Salon

Huda’s Salon peaks early, during the only scene that’s actually set at Huda’s Salon. Located in occupied Palestine—the film’s English subtitles pointedly never refer to Israel by name, only as “the Occupation”—the salon’s not exactly a hubbub of activity. Huda (Manal Awad) complains to regular customer Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) that too many young women now do their own hair, badly, working from YouTube tutorials. Chitchat in that vein continues for some time, as Huda shampoos Reem’s long tresses and towels them dry.

Yet viewers who comfortably settle in for an intimate portrait of women’s ordinary lives (along the lines of, say, Nadine Labaki’s Caramel) will be brought up short when Huda, without missing a beat in her breezy, casual patter, uses an eyedropper to dose the coffee she offers Reem, then drags her unconscious body to the back room, strips her naked, and takes photographs of her lying beside an equally naked man. Turns out the real reason why business is down at Huda’s Salon is that Huda’s been gradually “recruiting” her clientele, via blackmail, to work for the “Secret Service” (Shin Bet).

That’s one corker of an opening, and Palestinian writer-director Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now, Omar) can’t sustain its unnervingly mundane tension. The remainder of the film alternates metronomically between Huda’s plight and Reem’s, neither of which particularly informs or amplifies the other. The latter constitutes sheer panic, with Reem, who has an infant daughter and a husband who’s jealous and suspicious at the best of times, desperately weighing her options and deciding that they boil down to a) leave Palestine (which she can’t do without somehow acquiring a travel visa from Israel) or b) get murdered (whether by Shin Bet, Palestinian militants, or her own spouse). Every time her controlled frenzy works up a compelling head of steam, though, Abu-Assad cuts to Huda, who’s been abducted by said militants and struggles to maintain her dignity and self-respect opposite chief interrogator Hasan (Paradise Now star Ali Suliman), even as she knows perfectly well that death is imminent.

Either one of these dual narratives might have worked reasonably well on its own, even if Reem’s situation—complete innocent seeks to escape grave danger—is inherently more gripping than Huda’s. Leaping back and forth between them undermines the former’s urgency while underlining the latter’s single-spare-room theatricality. Huda’s lengthy (but constantly interrupted) face-off with Hasan seems modeled after the quid pro quo dynamic between Clarice Starling and Hannibal Lecter, with Huda responding to Hasan’s demands for information by peppering him with personal questions about his own life. That he actually answers these, while refraining from any sort of physical coercion (though he keeps threatening to bring in a “specialist”), seems less than plausible. And Abu-Assad’s screenplay favors simplistic, reductive equivalency: When Hasan tells a childhood story about inadvertently getting a friend killed to save himself, he then immediately, conveniently asks Huda why she sold out all of those other women, so that she can reply that her selfishness, while perhaps reprehensible, was no different from his.

As always with this filmmaker, the message is very clear: Palestine’s occupation is a nightmare for all concerned. Abd Elhadi’s frantic performance lends that idea real emotional force, which only makes it more frustrating when the movie keeps abandoning Reem to check in with the stage-bound battle of wills happening elsewhere. Salon’s second-best scene recalls the centerpiece of Romanian Palme d’Or winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days, as Reem attempts to keep it together during a dinner with the in-laws, her silent anxiety overwhelmed by the others’ inane small talk. Even there, though, Abu-Assad creates plausibility issues: Reem’s husband, Yousef (Jalal Masarwa), has noticed that Reem is upset about something she won’t talk about, knows that Reem just had an appointment at Huda’s Salon but didn’t actually get her hair cut, hears that Huda has been picked up by militants and that another woman has just died by suicide after being revealed as a traitor recruited by Huda… but somehow never puts one and one and one together. “I chose girls whose husbands were assholes,” Huda tells Hasan at one point. Sharply damning, but like so much else in this clumsy thriller, making them morons as well really stacks the deck.