The best thing about The Attack, an adaptation of Yasmina Khadra’s novel from Lebanese filmmaker Ziad Doueri, is its presentation of the attack itself. Each time a bomb explodes in Israel, most citizens must experience it as a faraway thud, and that’s just how this one registers to the hero, an Arab-Israeli surgeon (Ali Suliman), as he’s relaxing on a balcony during his lunch break. Granted, the choice may have been primarily budget-driven—big explosions are expensive—but it perfectly captures the everyday horror of such events, reinforcing the sense of futility they instill. Everybody gets up and wanders over to the edge of the balcony, trying to work out where it went off, but there’s nothing they can do—that is, not until the wounded start arriving in ambulances. Suliman is soon so busy attempting to save lives that he fails to notice when his wife’s badly mutilated corpse gets wheeled right past him. And the shock of discovering that she’s dead is immediately compounded by Shin Bet’s insistence that she was the suicide bomber.
