Starring Adel Karem. In Arabic, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

The older I get, the more I think religion sucks. Adherents always talk about the consoling power of faith. But look at how damn much consolation is needed these days!

The Insult is not really predicated on religious belief, but on the tribalism that results when political factions are built around competing sky gods. In this case, the sectarian conflict reflects Lebanon’s long-running civil war, which left permanent wounds on the landscape, and on the people.

“The war ended in 1990,” one Christian leader tells a TV audience. “But it’s still with us, because we never had a national reconciliation.” That message is heard, sort of, by Tony Hanna (excellent Adel Karem) a brooding, extensively tattooed auto repairman, whose wife is heavily pregnant with their first child. Tony’s always on the edge of exploding, and he seems incredibly offended when Beirut city worker Yasser Salameh (Kamel El Basha, a quietly charismatic theatre veteran) shows up unannounced to change the gutter on his balcony.

He refuses, and when the man’s crew does it from the outside, Tony smashes the new pipe with a hammer. Yasser calls him “a fucking prick” and splits. There are more insults along the way. Tony’s not religious, but is a member of a Christian party that feeds on anti-Muslim sentiment; he has a special animus against Palestinians, whose permanent-refugee status in the region rankles some Christians in particular. When Yasser’s boss pushes him to simply apologize to the younger man, he hesitates—just long enough for Tony to say, “I wish Ariel Sharon had wiped you all out.” That doesn’t sit well.

The next time they meet, it’s in court, as part of a spiralling legal battle that eventually gets the whole country in an uproar. The subsequent proceedings carry powerful messages about national identity and tribal loyalty. But the movie seems overly aware of that power. From the TV-drama music to the fact that opposing lawyers are supposed to be father and daughter, the whole thing feels constructed less to tell a story than to hammer some pretty basic points across.

Still, the well-shot movie does get under the skin of its main characters, who, in the end, keep letting masculine pride stand in the way of their better selves. They justify bad actions by “protecting” women they don’t even listen to. Ultimately, I left the movie realizing I wasn’t mad at religion after all. I was mad at men.