Maisa Abd Elhadi in Huda’s Salon (IFC Films)

A claustrophobic sense of entrapment pervades Hany Abu-Assad’s Palestine-based Huda’s Salon in all but the first few minutes of the film’s masterful opening 10-minute take. Reem (Maisa Abd Elhadi) sits in the chair at her acquaintance Huda’s beauty parlor as the two attractive women exchange gossip and small talk over a haircut. After drinking the coffee Huda (Manal Awad) offers, the younger woman suddenly passes out cold in her seat, and Huda and an accomplice take part in an act of swift, sordid betrayal. When Reem awakens, she is confronted by Huda with an offer she can’t refuse: work for the Israeli secret police or be branded as a traitor (and slut). Shaken, Reem flees the salon. But she’s being followed, setting in motion a chain of events that will ruin her—and Huda’s—life.

Huda’s Salon has a hard time living up to the decisiveness and technical bravura of its first few moments. In fairness, it doesn’t really try after shifting into a harsh, often talky political thriller set primarily in two traps: Reem’s home, where she balances a crying baby and a jealous, not very bright husband against her terrifying and unwanted new responsibilities as an Israeli asset; and the jail dark cell where Huda ends up after the Palestinian underground busts her blackmail ring.

The second of these scenarios is the more compelling. Director Abu-Assad has matched the steely Awad with a strong actor, Ali Suliman, who plays her interrogator, Hasan. These two bait, circle, and undercut each other with barbed dialogue and perhaps an underlying attraction; their body language at times suggests a couple working out an issue over a kitchen table rather than a pair of mortal adversaries. And indeed, these two have a lot in common. When the interrogator shares a childhood story about turning in an old friend to the occupying forces, she responds as one weary operative to another: “When it comes to their life or your life, what choice do you have?” After alternately taunting Huda, threatening her, or just soberly listening, Hasan is forced to admit that women in Palestine might be driven to desperate acts: they have a tough time and few options in the region’s stifling, patriarchal family structure, a theme the other wing of the movie explores in full.

Cooped up in the family apartment, Reem faces her own interrogation from a prickly, insecure partner who bristles at the phone calls she now regularly receives from the intelligence operation. Her in-laws make rude, insensitive comments, and a relative’s jail record prevents her from leaving the country. Reem weighs telling her husband what’s up, but thinks better of it—there’s no way she can even try. At home and outside, she faces suspicious enemies ready to turn on her no matter what she does. Abd Elhadi is a capable actress, but it must have been a challenge to bring shades to the endless miseries that encircle her beleaguered character. Tight camerawork on her traumatized face heightens the overwhelming tension.

Huda’s Salon ends at an arbitrary part of the action. It almost doesn’t have a proper ending at all. It does, however, reveal lives lived under constant threat, besieged by a host of furies. Some come from outside, some from within. As Huda snaps at Hasan, “Everyone is an enemy. It is easier to oppress a society that’s already repressing itself.”