97 min | R | September 23, 2022 | Netflix
A police killing in the projects sparks an uprising, and three brothers find themselves on opposite sides of it. One wants justice, one wants order, one wants profit. The fire spreads faster than anyone can think.
Athena opens on the aftermath of a death. A teenage boy is killed and a video shows police in the frame. The Athena housing estate erupts into open revolt before the institutions can respond. Romain Gavras stages the film as a Greek tragedy dressed in riot gear, with three brothers pulled into the fight from three directions. The film is not about who killed the boy. It is about how a community at war with the state tears itself apart from the inside.
Dali Benssalah plays Abdel, the soldier brother who wants to hold the peace, and his face carries the exhaustion of a man trapped between his uniform and his blood. Sami Slimane plays Karim as pure velocity, the younger brother who turns grief into insurrection and never stops moving. Anthony Bajon plays Jerome, a cornered cop, with sweating panic that makes the standoff feel lethal. Ouassini Embarek plays Moktar, the dealer who sees the chaos as a threat to his trade rather than a cause. Each brother represents a different answer to the same loss, and the actors keep those positions legible even as the staging overwhelms them.
Gavras and co-writers Ladj Ly and Elias Belkeddar build the film around bravura long takes that never let the audience rest. The opening sequence runs unbroken from a press conference into a Molotov assault into a stolen police van, and the camera moves like a fourth combatant in the riot. The handheld immersion collapses the distance between viewer and mob. The score pounds with choral menace that elevates the street battle into liturgy. The technique is relentless and precise, and it is also the loudest thing in the room.
The problem is that the spectacle outruns the story it carries. Gavras has the eye of a master and the camera of a war correspondent, but the script gives the brothers archetypes rather than interiors. The film moves so fast that its tragedy registers as momentum instead of grief. Athena is a formal achievement that knows exactly how to film an uprising and only partly knows what to say about one.