Position and possession. These are the two elements that fatefully combine in House of Sand and Fog to set a tragedy in motion. And it is a genuine tragedy, a case not of good versus bad, but of good versus good: two strangers become locked in a furious battle of wills, both have right on their side, and neither can give way to the other. It unfolds with an agonising momentum, for at every stage one can see how catastrophe could have been averted by common sense. Unfortunately, as someone once wrote, common sense ain't so common any more....The argument running through the movie is that America, while fabled as the land of opportunity, is also riven with fear of dispossession and exclusion; both Behrani and Kathy have felt, in different ways, the pain of separation, which is why they cling to the house as desperately as the shipwrecked to driftwood.....House of Sand and Fog has a sombre compulsion to its storytelling, and addresses its very American themes of status, family and ownership with a heart-squeezing conviction.

It's so rare to find a movie that doesn't take sides. Conflict is said to be the basis of popular fiction, and yet here is a film that seizes us with its first scene and never lets go, and we feel sympathy all the way through for everyone in it. To be sure, they sometimes do bad things, but the movie understands them and their flaws. Like great fiction, "House of Sand and Fog" sees into the hearts of its characters, and loves and pities them.... To admire a story you must be willing to listen to the people and observe them, and at the end of "House of Sand and Fog," we have seen good people with good intentions who have their lives destroyed because they had the bad luck to come across a weak person with shabby desires. And finally there is a kind of love and loyalty, however strange to us, that reveals itself in the marriage of Massoud and Nadi, and must be respected.

Like Antigone, it is the story of two rights adding up to a monstrous wrong. There are no clear villains, no serendipitous, life-altering accidents, only the slow, inexorable escalation of hasty decisions and excusable lapses in judgment toward an unbearable final catastrophe.