With City Exterminator, Christophe Karabache transforms Beirut into a dystopian territory, traversed by war, surveillance, and fear. Between genre cinema and Lebanese reality, the film explores the tensions of a fragile city, where fantasies of control collide with the chaos of everyday life.
In City Exterminator, Christophe Karabache transforms a city fragmented by war, surveillance, and fear into an unstable cinematic territory. At the crossroads of genre film and political observation, his work follows Nabil, an urban planner fascinated by order, and Sana, caught up in a world disintegrating around her. The result is a stark work of fiction, in which images of Beirut bear the traces of a reality that spills far beyond the screen.
The film is set against a period of upheaval that has profoundly affected Lebanon. In the autumn of 2024, as the filmmaker prepares another shoot, the military escalation and the attacks known as the “beeper attacks” bring filming to a halt. These events, which left dozens dead and thousands injured, also gave rise to a pervasive unease that seeped into even the most ordinary gestures.
This anxiety resonates in the story of City Exterminator, without reducing the film to a direct chronicle of current events. The city appears as a vulnerable organism, subject to forces that unsettle both its streets and its inhabitants. Karabache films from within this reality, as an independent filmmaker, and makes uncertainty a narrative substance.
A city under the watchful eye of surveillance
Nabil imagines a futuristic city where architecture would impose discipline and security. His rhetoric promises to put an end to disorder, but this promise conceals a desire for absolute control. Surveillance becomes the heart of his urban project.
Yet the elements of this dystopia are far removed from the spectacular technologies usually seen in the genre. Here, a fence, an ordinary phone, or an object repurposed from its intended use is enough to evoke a threat. This material poverty gives the film an unsettling closeness to everyday life.
The contrast between Nabil’s grand ambitions and the rudimentary means he employs fuels the story’s irony. He is not building a sleek future, but a space cluttered with blocks, barriers, and ominous signs. Architecture thus becomes the reflection of a mind that confuses protection with confinement.
Lebanese reality transformed by genre cinema
Karabache borrows from genre cinema without faithfully following its conventions. Science fiction, neo-noir, and horror bleed into one another, then warp through contact with the locations being filmed. Lebanon is not merely a backdrop: its geography and history leave their mark on every image.
Damaged buildings, roads, interchanges, and port facilities make up a landscape already laden with threats. The camera records these spaces as witnesses to possible destruction, sometimes already underway before the film even names it. The city thus seems to bear the ghosts of its own transformations.
This approach reminds us that contemporary conflict does not manifest itself only on the front lines. It also seeps into communications, familiar objects, and the way we perceive our surroundings. Electronic devices, far from being neutral, become sources of mistrust and anxiety.
Karabache’s cinema does not seek to make this experience comfortable or perfectly explicable. It assembles fragments of reality, violent visions, and fictional departures without smoothing them over. This friction gives rise to a hybrid form, deeply rooted in the Lebanese present.
Nabil and Sana, caught in a mechanism of domination
At the center of the film, Nabil develops an authoritarian vision of the city. He watches fighter jets from his apartment and dreams of a social order free of all resistance. His desire to master space, however, reveals a personality driven by its own impulses.
Sana moves through a world in which power dynamics gradually reduce her to a figure of vulnerability. The relationship between the two characters is not a simple parable, structured around a clear opposition between good and evil. Rather, it reveals how fantasies of power and concrete violence feed into one another.
Nabil’s trajectory goes off the rails as soon as his plans collide with his most brutal instincts. The story thus refuses the comfort of a neatly ordered dystopia, in which every element leads to a clear-cut argument. His ambitions of control begin to fracture, and the story gradually loses its stability.
The direction intensifies this downward spiral through motifs of bodies, mutilation, and transformation. A particularly gory surgical sequence brings the urban space close to an open, wounded body, not yet quite ready to be declared dead. This violence is not mere horror decoration: it helps convey the decomposition at work throughout the film.
Sana’s journey also leads toward images of escape and metamorphosis. The tunnels, desolate landscapes, and aimless wanderings deepen her confinement instead of offering a genuine way out. In this world, survival means moving forward amid the ruins without knowing whether an escape route exists.
Image and sound, the building blocks of persistent unease
The cinematography, developed with cinematographer Elie Partamian, creates a neo-noir atmosphere shot through with vivid colors and dense shadows. Windows, glass surfaces, and the angles of buildings create frames that seem to watch the characters themselves. At times, the light transforms Sana into an almost supernatural apparition.
Michel Deprez’s sound design gives prominence to voices, music, and the sounds of the city. Car journeys reveal interchanges and exit ramps as open-air labyrinths, where people travel without ever really escaping. The editing, meanwhile, breaks the narrative thread and favors repetitions, returns, and traumatic perceptions.
This discontinuous structure prevents viewers from settling into a reassuring interpretation. Some scenes initially seem to promise a conventional progression, before the story veers toward more unpredictable violence. The film does not merely tell of collapse: it makes us experience its ruptures.
References to genre cinema enrich this material without confining it to homage. The imagery of VHS-era vigilante films, certain science-fiction figures, and echoes of Frankenstein intersect with highly concrete details. To continue exploring genres and their transformations, you can also read this article on [Adagio, where Stefano Sollima reinvents the poliziottesco].
The music and atmosphere help sustain a tension that does not depend solely on the action. Viewers sense the threat in empty spaces, lingering sounds, and averted gazes. The city becomes a partner in the story, at once a backdrop, a trap, and an almost living presence.
An independent work amid upheaval
The shoot for Guérilla Beyrouth, undertaken in haste after the original project was interrupted, bears witness to the way Karabache works in close proximity to events. City Exterminator extends this attention to political upheavals, giving them an off-kilter, sometimes grotesque, often harrowing form. The artist does not claim to offer a solution or heal the wounds his images expose.
The film thus reflects a vision of cinema as an independent act, shaped as much by constraints as by aesthetic choices. Available locations, modest means, and the instability of the circumstances become creative elements. This method gives the images a roughness that contrasts with big-budget technological dystopias.
This approach reflects a desire to capture the effects of violence on ordinary lives, particularly when fear transforms our relationship with objects and everyday gestures. The film echoes a reality in which people may look at their phones with suspicion and hesitate to approach an electronic device. This human dimension remains at the heart of the horror, behind the surveillance systems and apocalyptic visions.
In contemporary Lebanese cinema, Karabache’s work stands out for its vital energy and its refusal to make melancholy the only horizon. In its own way, it joins the work of filmmakers who continue to shoot despite crises. The French release of City Exterminator is scheduled for November 18, with a premiere at Studio Galande.
Connections between cinema, music, and social narratives can also open up other avenues for interpretation. The article on [Christy Hall’s new musical work, “Daddio”] offers another entry point into the links between artistic creation and contemporary experience. In Karabache’s work, this experience takes the form of a city traversed by fear, where physical and mental ruins continually echo one another.
City Exterminator: Christophe Karabache explores the tensions of the city
In City Exterminator, Beirut is not merely a backdrop: the city acts, threatens, and shapes the characters. Its interchanges, abandoned buildings, and damaged infrastructure make up a territory where violence seems to have been etched into the concrete itself. Christophe Karabache transforms these locations into unstable spaces on the boundary between reality and nightmare. The futuristic city imagined by Nabil, founded on order and surveillance, seems less to herald a distant future than to extend the anxieties of the present.
The film takes shape in a context marked by war, fear, and the intrusion of violence into everyday life. This threat informs both gestures and images: ordinary devices become suspect, while streets and buildings seem to retain traces of events. Karabache does not seek to reconstruct the conflict according to the conventions of an explanatory narrative. Instead, he captures its tremors, fragments, and repercussions, through a style of filmmaking that draws on genre cinema without being confined by it.
Nabil’s journey, as an urban planner who dreams of eliminating disorder, highlights the vertigo of a power that claims it can control everything. Opposite him, Sana and the other figures in the story move through spaces that constrain and disorient them in equal measure. Physical violence, impulses, and nightmarish visions undermine plans for control. Neo-noir lighting, shadows, and abrupt editing reinforce the sense of a world whose bearings are coming undone.
The city then appears as a wounded body, traversed by escape routes, construction sites, and ruins. Extended shots of roads and landscapes convey the characters’ isolation, while the sound brings anxiety into even the most familiar spaces. Amid these structures, Nabil’s eye, the tunnels Sana travels through, and opaque windows sketch out an uncertain map, where one moves forward without knowing what awaits on the other side.
