Regimes: "Moon"

Not the Sam Rockwell space vehicle directed by David Bowie's son, but the latest Austrian thriller - produced, somewhat ominously, by Ulrich Seidl - in which we find a domestic space isn't quite what it first appears. With her Moon, the Iraqi-born writer-director Kurdwin Ayub has however arrived at what feels like a fresh story, or at least a new variation on a familiar-sounding arthouse theme. Her heroine Sarah (Florentina Holzinger) is a former MMA fighter who's carved out a new career as an instructor, finding herself much in demand. Early scenes suggest modern life is characterised by degrees of conflict: Sarah's younger students, who take to the gym largely as a means of generating Instagram content, complain that she's punching into their safe space, while her bourgeois sister doesn't understand her career choices and wishes she'd put a coaster under her coffee cup. She lands an even bigger fight after being hired by a worryingly slick Jordanian businessman (Omar AlMajali) to come out to the kingdom and coach his teenage sisters. What we subsequently observe is female empowerment within the tightest strictures. Sarah thinks nothing of signing an NDA upon arriving at the family's palatial residence, but she's given cause to wonder why she has to be chaperoned at every stage of the working day, why some areas of the house are deemed off-limits, and why one of the sisters, Nour (Andria Tayeh), is so keen to borrow her phone after every session. As instruction becomes secondary to investigation, Moon - presumably so named because its moneyed backdrop seems like another planet - shapes up into something like Rebecca with WiFi and homemade Botox.

As a film, it's fairly athletic in its own right, offering a workout for the mind, body and central nervous system. The structure is taut enough: beyond the mystery of this household, Ayub sets out her heroine's initially regimented, increasingly unravelling routine, pausing only to observe the prayer times in this part of the world. Yet she keeps individual scenes loose and limber, the better to describe the push-me-pull-you between the protagonist and the men she's outnumbered by out this way, then the improvised-seeming back-and-forths, often conducted in a hesitant second tongue, between Sarah and the girls. These sequences are Moon's most intriguing, because they permit the stern-seeming Holzinger to let both her hair and her guard down, and allow Ayub to contrast radically different ideas of the feminine. In one corner, a gymbunny who displays no interest whatsoever in traditional femininity; in the others, three mallrats confined to a deeply conservative milieu governed by rules and restrictions that go back centuries, if not millennia. The wrinkle Ayub introduces is to suggest the girls aren't entirely damsels in distress, rather willing participants in their own oppression; furthermore, that Sarah might be abetting their oppressors by taking the money and keeping schtum. (It's more than faintly ironic that the film is being platformed by MUBI, whose own financial arrangements have come under heightened scrutiny in recent weeks.) One late excursion to a hellish nightclub struck me as rather sluggish, Gaspar Noé-influenced footwork, but Ayub rallies for a tense final reel, and an uneasy coda that brings everything under discussion back home. Are things really much better in the West? This filmmaker could well be a contender yet.

Moon is now streaming via MUBI.