Daniel Khalife asked Iranian contacts if he should travel to Iran or Lebanon to train, prosecutors say.

When Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed last month, my social-media feeds lit up with images and videos from Syria, my home country. In some areas, including Idlib and the suburbs of Aleppo, residents celebrated late into the night, blasting music and raising banners calling for Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian dictator, to be next. People handed out sweets; celebratory messages, memes, and phone calls flooded my WhatsApp. But the news channels broadcasting from just across the border captured something else: a wave of grief sweeping southern Lebanon.

The jubilation on one side of the line and the mourning on the other reflect our region’s deep complexity. For several years, Hezbollah ravaged the Syrian opposition on behalf of the autocratic Assad government. Its intervention left deep scars—displacement, destruction, and trauma, especially in the Damascus suburbs and Homs, which Hezbollah besieged. The Syrians who welcomed Nasrallah’s assassination were not exactly celebrating the Israelis who carried it out. But many of us felt that for once, the world had tipped in our favor.

Assad—and his father, the dictator Hafez al-Assad, before him—had made Syria the crucial geographical and political link between Iran and Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shiite militia could not have survived without the weapons, fighters, and funds that Tehran supplied by way of Syria. But in 2011, circumstances in Syria threatened this arrangement. Peaceful protests challenged the country’s autocracy; Assad met them brutally, and the country’s opposition transformed into an armed rebellion. Nasrallah saw little choice but to defend his supply line and political network. Hezbollah justified this intervention by framing it as a war against extremists, a fight against chaos, and a defense of Syria’s sovereignty against Western-backed militants. But on the ground, Hezbollah wasn’t just fighting armed factions; it was waging a war against the Syrian people.

[Read: Nasrallah’s folly]

Madaya, a small town near the Lebanese border, lay along Hezbollah’s supply route to Syria. Armed rebel fighters reached that town in 2015, and Hezbollah, together with Assad’s forces, encircled it, cutting off food and medical supplies. Within weeks, the people of Madaya were starving. A border town once home to markets for smuggled electronics and clothes transformed into a fortress of suffering. Some civilians resorted to eating leaves, grass, or stray animals. People foraging for food were shot by snipers or killed by land mines. At least 23 people, six of them babies younger than 1, died from starvation in Madaya in a little over a month, in December 2015 and January 2016. An international outcry did nothing to stop Hezbollah from continuing to enforce its siege.

Syrians tried to expose these horrors by posting stories and photos from Madaya on social media. But before long, supporters of Hezbollah and the Syrian government sadistically  adopted the hashtag “in solidarity with the siege of Madaya” and posted photos of tables laden with grilled meat and fish, along with selfies in front of overloaded fridges. Despite numerous human-rights groups’ reports to the contrary, the government and Hezbollah claimed that the photos of starvation were fake, and that no civilians remained in Madaya anyway—just foreign agents and traitors whose deaths were necessary to save Syria.

Madaya remained under blockade until 2017, when Qatar, representing the rebel forces, and Iran, representing the Syrian government, brokered an evacuation deal relocating the survivors of the siege to opposition-held areas, such as Idlib. Worn down by hunger and bombardment, the evacuees were told to pack only one small bag each, and leave everything else behind.

Hezbollah was not kinder to other Syrian cities. In Aleppo, a relentless bombing campaign that was the joint work of the Syrian government, Russian forces, and Hezbollah destroyed neighborhoods, killed thousands of people, and wrecked infrastructure. Nasrallah called the contest for Aleppo the “greatest battle” of the Syrian war. He deployed additional fighters there to tighten the regime’s hold. Civilians were forced to evacuate—and as they did so, Hosein Mortada, one of the founders of the Iranian news channel Al-Alam and a propagandist embedded with Hezbollah, stood by and mocked them.

Mortada was already infamous among Syrians for turning media coverage into a weapon of psychological warfare. With his thick Lebanese accent and brutal livestreams from the battlefield, Mortada cheered missile strikes and referred to opposition figures as “sheep.” In one YouTube video, he sits in a big bulldozer and praises its power, then squats in the dirt with a toy truck, saying gleefully, “This bulldozer is better for some of you, because you don’t have anything.”

Many who endured the siege of their cities, only to have Hezbollah agents mock and question their suffering before international eyes, have little ambivalence about celebrating Nasrallah’s death. They view the Hezbollah leader’s fate with a tragic sense of justice: Finally, someone whose hands were stained with blood, and who seemed untouchable, was killed.

But as the prominent Syrian intellectual and dissident Yassin Al Haj Saleh often admonished, looking at the world solely through a Syrian lens only isolates us. For many of us Syrians who were active in the uprising and now live in exile, that warning has resonated since Nasrallah’s death. Both on social media and in private conversations, we question whether the justice felt in Nasrallah’s demise should be tempered with concern for the broader regional suffering. We ask: Is it moral to welcome Nasrallah’s killing if the cost is the destruction of Lebanon—a country already reeling from economic collapse, political mismanagement, and the Beirut port explosion just a few years ago? Nasrallah is dead—but for many Syrians who oppose Israel’s war in Gaza, which has killed thousands of civilians, the manner of his death made the event hard to celebrate. Dara Abdallah, a Syrian writer and poet exiled in Berlin, wrote on social media that he could not condone Nasrallah’s assassination, because the means—what appears to have been multiple 2,000-pound bombs rather than, say, a sniper’s bullet—demonstrated that “Israel has no problem eliminating an entire group of people in order to kill just one person.”

[Read: How Beirut is responding to Hassan Nasrallah’s death]

I worry that when the parties, memes, and trays of sweets are finished, Syria will be all the more isolated. Our country’s anguish has been pushed to the margins of global consciousness. Its regime has committed atrocities detailed in thousands of pages of documents that have yielded nothing but distant, largely symbolic trials in European courts. To live through all of this is to understand, in the deepest sense, that the world’s moral compass does not always point toward justice.

When the news of Nasrallah’s death broke, many Syrians felt, for a brief moment, that an elusive dream had taken material shape—that eliminating a figure like Nasrallah would somehow move us closer to peace, closer to righting the wrongs done to us. But the rising death toll in Lebanon also suggests a bitter truth. I am reminded of other moments in our region’s history—the deaths of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qaddafi, for example—that seemed at first to render justice but only perpetuated the cycle of violence.

In our region, we sometimes feel as though accountability is destined to be followed by more destruction and bloodshed—as though we can never say that the scales have tipped in our favor without questioning the cost.

As the young Donald Trump in the new film The Apprentice, Sebastian Stan slouches while he walks, pouts while he talks, and delivers every line of dialogue in a near monotone. Such behaviors tend to form the foundation for any recent Trump performance, but Stan delivers more than a comic impression. He finds complexity in these hallmarks: an instinctual defensiveness in those hunched shoulders, a frustrated petulance in the scowls. It’s precise work, in other words.

If only the film around him were just as carefully calibrated. The Apprentice attempts to chart Trump’s rise from real-estate businessman to future presidential candidate by focusing on his early career in the 1970s and ’80s, when, under the tutelage of the pugnacious lawyer Roy Cohn (played by Succession’s Jeremy Strong), he learned how to project power and not just crave it. The film is a muddy exercise in Trumpology that never answers the biggest question it raises: What does chronicling Trump’s beginnings illuminate about one of the most documented and least mysterious men in recent American history?

Not much, as it turns out. Yet the film struggled to find a U.S. distributor willing to back it during production; Trump is a polarizing figure, after all, and famously litigious. After its debut at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, The Apprentice indeed faced legal threats from the Trump campaign, leaving it languishing for months in search of any company that might help it reach American audiences—the ones most likely to see, and be affected by, the film. Briarcliff Entertainment, a small company that has begun to develop a reputation for picking up controversial projects, stepped in and launched a Kickstarter campaign to crowdfund the movie’s theatrical run, which begins Friday.

[Read: The most consequential TV show in history]

But the director, Ali Abbasi, an Iranian Danish filmmaker whose previous film, Holy Spider, turned a real-life serial-killer case into a fascinating drama, has insisted that The Apprentice isn’t meant to truly be about Trump; rather, it’s an outsider’s perspective on America through its most divisive avatar. “We wanted to do a punk-rock version of a historical movie,” Abbasi told Vanity Fair, citing Stanley Kubrick’s transporting epic Barry Lyndon as an inspiration. He, along with the screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, a journalist who has long covered Trump, intended to “strip politics” from the story altogether.

The idea of a politics-free film about Trump may be provocative to some viewers, but The Apprentice never quite achieves this goal. The action unfolds in two parts: In the first, the 20-something Trump, still attempting to carve out a real-estate career and climb the social ladder, is dazzled by Cohn’s celebrity. He tails him around New York City for much of the 1970s while absorbing Cohn’s three tenets for success: Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing, deny everything; and claim victory, never admit defeat. In the second part, Trump has come to embody those rules fully. It’s only a two-year time jump, from 1977 to 1979, yet it feels jarring, because the Trump of the ’80s is more ruthless than Cohn ever was. And that decision, to skip past depicting his shift toward callousness, prevents the film from fulfilling Abbasi and Sherman’s aim of interpreting America’s transformation. It drops plenty of tasteless hints at present-day Trump instead: A scene of him being intrigued by the potential new slogan for Ronald Reagan’s first presidential campaign—“Let’s make America great again!”—is played for laughs. When, during an interview, he scoffs at the prospect of launching a political campaign himself, the shot holds for an extra beat, as if daring viewers to chuckle along with him.

By omitting the years when Trump started coming into his own, The Apprentice delivers a summary of his character rather than an arc. Take his relationship with Ivana (Maria Bakalova), for instance: In the film’s first half, Trump is a hapless suitor, literally falling over during an attempt to impress her. In the second half, he is seen assaulting his now-wife in their home in a violent scene that likely drew the Trump campaign’s ire. (The scene is based on Ivana’s recounting of an incident in a 1990 divorce deposition, which she later recanted; Trump also denied the allegation.) The contrast underlines the difference between a power-hungry man and an actually powerful one, but it doesn't show us the trajectory itself. The Apprentice suggests that Cohn hastened whatever rot was already present in his protégé, but its early scenes portray the opposite—that Trump, at his core, was simply naive. He desperately attempts to contribute to his family’s real-estate business; he idolizes his older brother; he displays a simpering loyalty to Cohn. Abbasi may have wanted to avoid putting his finger on the political scale—to steer clear of sympathy or condemnation—but the result is a shallow, murky portrait.

[Read: HBO’s Roy Cohn documentary is a lesson for Trump]

Perhaps this lack of substance is meant to evoke the flimsiness of the TV show the movie is named after. But The Apprentice offers glimmers of more nuanced ideas. It is handsomely shot, the production design making 1970s New York look like it’s in a state of decay, with the grime extending to the staging: Trump, in one of the earlier, more dynamic scenes, corners Cohn in a bathroom to convince him of his worth. The best parts of the film engage with how Cohn boosted his own ego and drew considerable pleasure from molding Trump into his image; Stan and Strong deliver committed, electric performances in their scenes together. But the energy fizzles when The Apprentice descends into a supercut of the younger Trump’s lore. It re-creates some of his most braggadocious interviews. It shows his reported scalp-reduction surgery. It ends in 1987, with him meeting the ghostwriter of his memoir. When an ailing Cohn finally confronts Trump for avoiding him, the encounter feels perfunctory, a mere interruption of an extended clip show.

The Apprentice could have delved into the Trump persona or explored how it calcified. But by trying to avoid how Trump’s past reflects his current approach to politics—his zero-sum relationship to power, his pettiness and egotism—while simultaneously winking at viewers’ knowledge of him, the film lands itself in a trap. Abbasi and Sherman’s intent—to hold today’s Trump at arm’s length and dramatize his backstory in “punk-rock,” cheeky fashion—is inherently flawed, because separating Trump’s philosophies from his transformation as a public figure means dulling the story of any potency or relevance. Even the one relationship, between Trump and Cohn, that feels potentially insightful gets diminished by the end. The film becomes an exhausting reenactment of familiar events instead—a safe endeavor that coasts on its protagonist’s infamy.