Metacritic reviews

It will stick with you long after you leave the theater. It is as moving as it is possible for a film to be.

Fayyad and his cinematographers and editors wield the cameras and shape the scenes in the documentary so beautifully that The Cave is both intensely real and a carefully wrought work of cinema. A kind of counterpart to Last Men, the new film is perhaps more wrenching and even more ambitious in its visuals.

This is both an immensely humanist film, and a tough, heartbreaking watch.

Entering theaters at a timely moment, The Cave is a frightening immersion in life under siege in Syria that, as difficult as it often is to watch, can’t come close to replicating how harrowing it must have been to film.

It’s a frantic, unnerving window into Syria’s collapse, and a nerve-wracking thriller that alternates between acts of courage and utter despair; through that paradox, it captures the struggles on the ground in intimate detail.

Fayyad’s cameras roam freely through the hospital and paint an intimate picture of the facility in which many of the patients are indeed children who’ve grown up under the shadow of warplanes. The footage of injured children and malnourished babies is wrenching and hard to watch, to the point where you wonder how Dr. Amani and her colleagues can fail to succumb to hopelessness and rage.

The Cave reminds us of the horrors of a situation we have perhaps become numb to and shows us the unforgettable people who don’t have that luxury.

The grace notes don’t obscure the ugly situation we’re shown here. It’s not compact, perfectly organized film, but The Cave is an honest fly-on-the-wall/cinema verite portrait of a place and a couple of the people working in it.

Its depiction of the perpetual terror of living in a war zone will stick with viewers long after The Cave’s doctors have left Ghouta.

It’s a monotonous descent into agony that coasts on the impossibility of anyone walking away unaffected by the imagery.