Filmmaker Mark Jackson's dark cross-cultural psychodrama, divided into three acts, follows a Franco-Arabic girl, Hafsia (Hafsia Herzi), who impulsively travels from her home—thinly detailed as a Muslim enclave of Paris—to New York City to see childhood friend Sarah (Sarah Kazemy), working as an actress in the glamorous and pretentious Manhattan performing-arts scene. But the reunion gradually grows chilly; Sarah is having career and relationship issues, and regards Hafsia as a directionless, unsophisticated part of a past best left behind. Hafsia steals Sarah's credit cards and flees to her former friend's getaway cabin well outside the city, with only a few scattered strangers as company. There, disconnected in the woods, Hafsia alternates between exhilarating freedom and paranoid panic, frightened of unseen animals, of the men attracted by her voluptuous and exotic beauty, of the lingering anti-Muslim resentment remaining from 9/11. The heroine's mental instability progresses, and her interaction with an oblivious city couple, in the forest for a weekend escape of drinks and sex, threatens to become something very bad indeed. With echoes of Polanski's Repulsion (and perhaps of Herzog’s Stroszek) this feels not at all like a conventional American problem-picture, with seemingly random incidents (such as the sweatshirt Hafsia wears with the words 'THIS TEACHER' on the chest) lending a mounting sense of dread, disconnection and one cryptic character’s inner meltdown. Material goes into well-trodden territory of xenophobia, racism, sexism and angst in the post World-Trade-Center USA, but makes the approach fresh and startling by offering an inarticulate lead who may have more than a few screws loose herself (and she may be just as much an implicit criticism of patriarchal Islam society as she is of American ignorance and intolerance). Performances are excellent down the line. Recommended.