Capernaum.

The Lebanese film Capernaum, which landed one of the five nominations for this year’s Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and took home the Jury Prize at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, is both a daring effort to tell a grim story through the eyes of a poor child and an exercise in extended misery porn that seems to border on the exploitative. Told with a framing device that never quite works as intended, the story follows a 12-year-old boy who is neglected by his oversized family as he runs away, finds refuge with an undocumented Ethiopian worker, and eventually commits a violent crime that lands him a five-year sentence in juvenile prison.

Zain, played by a novice actor and Syrian refugee named Zain Al Rafeea, has already been convicted of that crime at the start of the film when we meet him as he sues his parents for something that is never that clear, although if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen where he tells the judge he wants his parents to be forced to stop having children. (His mother is pregnant, yet again, during the trial.) Zain and his younger siblings are forced to hustle on the street every day to bring in money for their family, never attending school, until one day his parents discover his eleven-year-old sister, Sahar, has hit puberty, which means they can sell her to the local shopkeeper as a bride. Zain runs away from home and ends up on the street until Tigest, an Ethiopian woman with a baby at home whose existence she’s trying to hide from the world, takes him in, allowing him to take care of her son Yonas during the day while she works. She’s caught in a roundup of illegal immigrants while at work, leaving Zain and Yonas to fend for themselves, setting in motion a spiral of events that ends with Zain in prison.

The story is told in flashbacks between snippets from the civil case, and the framing device works against the film on several levels, not least because it’s unrealistic and serves as a sort of revenge fantasy element against Zain’s parents. (The question of whether his mother has any agency over her reproductive system is never raised; abortion is illegal in Lebanon, and birth control is available but stigmatized.) Writer-director Nadine Labaki, who also appears as Zain’s lawyer, has packed enough ideas in here for a much longer movie, including multiple issues around women’s rights, child labor, immigration laws, the Syrian refugee crisis, and the exploitation of the poor, which results in a movie without any real thematic focus that instead makes Zain’s suffering the core conceit of the plot. His character has an obvious Oliver Twist quality to him, a combination of a strong survival instinct as well as intense empathy for other children who suffer around him, but Labaki uses him like a pinball and keeps tilting the script to make things a little worse for him at every turn until he finally snaps (with reason) and commits the crime for which he’s jailed.

Al Rafeea’s performance as Zain is remarkable, given his background: He’d never acted or had any training, had lived in Lebanon as a Syrian refugee for eight years, and couldn’t read or write. (Labaki has since said that he’s been resettled in Norway, a lightly ironic outcome as the character Zain wants to buy himself passage to Sweden. In the same piece, she says the filmmakers started a fund to try to help other kids shown in the movie who “still live in dire conditions.”) I found him credible in every way, even though the script demands that he portray a broad range of emotions, some of which you would think would be hard to fake, like the empathy he shows for other kids or the contempt in which he holds just about every adult in his life. But the lawsuit is just a gimmick; it’s never clear what the actual claim is, and how Zain gets into that courtroom with his own lawyer is funny but also wildly unrealistic, as are the two feel-good vignettes that wrap up the film. There’s much to recommend in the middle of Capernaum – just about everything involving Zain in the streets is great, and some of the camerawork when he’s running through Beirut’s slums or walking along the side of a highway with cars flying by him is tremendous – but Labaki tried to tackle too much here instead of just letting Zain’s story stand on its own. There’s just no way this should have taken a nomination over the Korean submission, Burning, which is still the best movie I saw from 2018, but didn’t make the final cut.