It's often hard to get your bearings in life, feeling like things aren't right and needing some kind of guidance to set them straight. But where do you go for help when you lack close friends or family who can offer meaningful support? Maybe peers, coworkers, or a therapist? This is the situation facing Donya (Anita Wali Zada), an Afghan immigrant living in Fremont, California, near San Francisco and surrounded by others from her homeland. Having served as a translator for the U.S. Army in Afghanistan, she was able to secure a special visa that brought her safely to America after the withdrawal of troops. Now, she has what seems like a decent job writing messages for fortune cookies—a rather unusual position—but otherwise, her life feels empty. She frequently questions the “fortune” she’s experienced compared to those still in Afghanistan, finding it difficult to accept and struggling with loneliness and severe sleeplessness. The question is, what's behind these feelings? Is it guilt, isolation, a lack of belonging, or perhaps a combination of all three? Writer-director Babak Jalali’s film explores these themes through the experiences of an isolated immigrant and a young adult searching for their place in the world. And to its credit, the movie does offer some truly insightful observations on these subjects. However, there aren't enough of those insights to make it a truly illuminating or well-developed character study. A lot of the film feels aimless, especially later on, wandering through a series of unremarkable events and failing to fully develop the ideas it initially presents so effectively. The movie also includes some amusingly strange moments of humor, but again, there isn't enough of it, which is a shame because when it works, it’s quite good. Solid acting, interesting character development, and striking black-and-white cinematography enhance the film's strengths. Still, this feels like another case where additional script work and tighter editing could have significantly improved the overall quality—a problem that seems to be affecting many movies these days. Appreciate what works well here, but don’t be surprised if you feel it falls short of its potential.

Source on TMDB