Furies: Clooney-Backed Beirut Heist Thriller at Venice

Rami Kodeih's Furies, backed by George Clooney and premiering at Venice, follows two women who plan to rob a Beirut bank to reclaim their frozen savings. According to IndieWire, the film positions itself as both a heist thriller and a commentary on economic empowerment.

The premise lands with specific weight in 2026, because Lebanese depositors have spent the better part of seven years watching their savings disappear behind locked glass. Starting in late 2019, Lebanese banks began imposing informal capital controls: customers could withdraw only small amounts per week, then per month, then sometimes nothing at all. On Hamra Street in Beirut, the main commercial artery, people queued outside branch after branch in the warm October air, their phones showing the real-time collapse of the lira while a security guard explained, politely, that there was nothing to give them. The lira, which had traded near 1,500 to the dollar for decades, collapsed to tens of thousands of pounds per dollar by 2023. Some depositors eventually stopped asking. Others did not: in a series of incidents that made international news between 2022 and 2023, individual depositors entered banks with weapons and withdrew their own money by force. Lebanese courts were left to consider whether reclaiming your own savings constitutes robbery.

IndieWire describes the film's two protagonists as motivated by the desire to reclaim their financial independence, which means Kodeih is not inventing a dramatic scenario so much as giving narrative shape to something Lebanese audiences have already navigated. The bank in Furies is not a fictional convenience; it is an institution whose relationship with depositors became adversarial enough that the law itself struggled to name what was happening.

Choosing the heist genre to carry this story is a specific creative decision, and a defensible one. Drama and documentary can document suffering; heist films put audiences inside the logic of people who decide to stop waiting. The genre requires audiences to follow the plan, to want it to succeed. That structural sympathy is precisely what makes the choice interesting here, because Lebanese depositors who walked into banks demanding their own money were, in most accounts, met with significant public support. The heist thriller has always accommodated stories where the usual moral categories have stopped functioning cleanly, and the Lebanese banking crisis was one of the more comprehensive breakdowns of those categories in recent memory.

Clooney's involvement extends beyond name recognition. His production company, Smokehouse Pictures, which he runs with producing partner Grant Heslov, has a consistent record of backing projects that use genre or prestige formats to carry political arguments: Syriana, Good Night, and Good Luck, The Ides of March, Our Brand Is Crisis. None of these are innocent entertainments that happen to have a political backdrop; all of them treat the political argument as load-bearing. Furies, as reported by IndieWire, fits that pattern. What Clooney's backing also does is send a film about an Arab economic catastrophe into a festival and distribution circuit that has historically treated Arab narratives as art-house margin rather than commercial center. A Beirut heist thriller with Clooney's name attached is a different distribution conversation than one without it.

Venice 2026 offers some context for where the festival's appetite sits. Palestinian-Jordanian actress Hiam Abbass appears in Reed Van Dyk's Iraq War drama Atonement alongside Boyd Holbrook and Kenneth Branagh, according to The Playlist. Abbass has spent three decades navigating between Arabic-language cinema and English-language prestige productions, and her presence this season in a film built around her performance suggests the festival is creating space for actors whose careers were built on exactly this kind of cultural brokerage. Whether that represents a programming shift or a confluence, acquisition patterns over the next year will answer more clearly than any single film's reception.

The craft question a Venice premiere cannot resolve is whether Kodeih can hold both registers at once. Heist films are pleasurable because they are architectural: the plan, the complication, the near-miss, the pivot. They let audiences root for thieves without requiring a full account of the vault's history. Furies appears to be asking for that account from the first frame, which creates a productive tension and also a real risk. The Lebanese banking crisis was not a simple story with identifiable villains and an otherwise functioning system. The banks' behavior was enabled by a political class that had captured the financial structure over decades; depositors were victims of that architecture before they were victims of any individual institution. A film that flattens this into clean revenge may be easier to sell and less honest about where the money actually went.

The record is too thin at this stage for a judgment on execution. What IndieWire's coverage establishes is the premise and the backing; what it cannot yet tell us is whether Kodeih has found the moment when the heist mechanics and the political argument lock into the same gear rather than trading turns. Parasite found it. Sorry to Bother You found it, imperfectly. That is the threshold Furies will be measured against when the lights come up in Venice.

For audiences who followed the Lebanese crisis from outside, through photographs of queues and headlines about lira collapse, Furies may make legible the texture of a specific humiliation: the indignity of being told, by a security guard at a branch on Hamra Street, that the number in your account is a number you can no longer touch. For Lebanese audiences, the premise requires no setup. The bank was already the villain before anyone called it a heist.

By Priya Chandrasekaran