There is war, and there is war. The more intimate variety plays out against the global kind in The Patience Stone, a film with an unspecified location but a painfully recognizable set of conflicts.
On the smaller front, we find a wife and (unnamed) mother trying to keep it together in the midst of chaos. The family home is in a battle zone where Taliban-like fighters regularly rake through the neighborhood. What’s particularly alarming is that the woman’s husband—an older man she was forced to marry 10 years earlier—has been comatose for two weeks, having sustained an injury in the conflict. He might wake up; he might not. As she feeds him through a tube, she begins talking to him—an outpouring that becomes the movie’s dominant drama, dwarfing even the combat going on outside.