Are You Glad I’m Here is a 2018 drama about a millennial American girl who befriends a Lebanese housewife and disrupts her ordered life; one night they become accidental partners-in-crime.
Despite the cross-cultural differences and complications that pepper the story of Noor Gharzeddine‘s Are You Glad I’m Here, there is a universal familiarity between the women that transcends traditions and age. These are women with very little in common and yet find strength within each other, the film an often transfixing visual experience that balances vicious dark comedy with unimaginable tragedy. A methodical, purposefully-paced thriller, it holds true to many of the genre’s more recognizable conventions while mixing plenty more powerfully personal and cultural aspects that have surprising impact.
In Lebanon, on the edges of Beirut, Kirsten (Tess Harrison) is a twenty-four-year old American teaching English, though is already planning on a move elsewhere, wanting more experiences in her life. She lives in a school sponsored apartment, across the hall from Lebanese housewife Nadine (Marwa Khalil), who is raising her young son Rami (Charbel Makhlouf). Nadine is married to Pierre (Najeeb Zeitouni), a workaholic, philandering man who abuses his wife and is often not home. Kirsten and Nadine become fast friends and bond as the younger woman tries to figure out how best to help the other trapped in a cycle of domestic violence. Doing so has frightening consequences.
Gharzeddine, in her feature length debut, proves herself a patient filmmaker, ever-so-slowly developing a toxic situation that eventually reaches a boiling point, yet in her always carefully subdued hands is much more a troubling simmer than a standard bit of chaos. While it’s a harrowing story, it’s also a savage black comedy with moments that feel as if ripped from a Coen Brothers film, yet Gharzeddine never lets it stray too far, reeling it into authenticity at every turn. There’s an absolutely sensational moment when Nadine’s brother arrives at her home after she calls him in desperation, bringing two friends. While he simply holds her in his arms in a powerfully upsetting sequence, what’s happening around him is equally distressing and yet, somehow, incredibly funny. It’s not the only time that happens.
Khalil and Harrison are both well cast, playing women of greatly diverse pasts that find they are actually not so different. Kirsten is inexperienced and independent, highly-confident and ultra extroverted while her neighbor is reclusive, stuck in the home, her dreams long abandoned and existing only to raise her son. Yet there is an almost instinctive bond between them that sees influence from both, where Kirsten becomes witness to the troubles in Nadine’s home and hopes to inspire action.
Working from a screenplay by Samuel Cyrenius Anderson, Gharzeddine keeps this a compact story, and while we get a small taste of life in Beirut, the film is more meant to encompass a world view. While it doesn’t necessarily break any rules and sticks to some predictable beats, the result is hardly less satisfying, with Gharzeddine’s measured and often innovative style making it a highly-compelling watch.
There’s a short conversation in the doorway of Nadine’s mother’s home toward the end of the film, one between she and Kirsten that comments about the age of the house … and the way it’s filmed and delivered, especially while something less inviting is happening elsewhere in the story, is gripping stuff. It’s these small moments in Are You Glad I’m Here that pop up everywhere in making this feel special.