She spends her day in nearby San Francisco working at a fortune cookie factory run by a married couple, the kind and outgoing Ricky and his wife, Lin, who appears to dislike Donya.

As her sessions with Dr. Anthony continue, it is revealed that her insomnia is largely due to her survivor's guilt over leaving her family and others behind in Kabul.

Dr. Anthony suggests that her parents must have been proud of her for being the only female translator, but Donya explains that she was instead considered a traitor by people in their neighborhood and her family started receiving death threats.

She initially laughs it off, but later admits to Salim that she longs for a romantic partner, but feels it would be unfair if she met someone who made her happy since many are still suffering in her hometown.

[11] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 72 out of 100, based on 11 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.

[12] Reviewing the film for Variety, Tomris Laffry wrote, "The biggest achievement of Jalali here is the precise tone that he strikes with his mild-mannered movie: never cutesy...and always several feet deeper in its themes and deliberations around human isolation than meets the eye.

"[13] The Guardian's Wendy Ide described it as "admirably understated film-making" and praised Jeremy Allen White's performance which "tears out our hearts with two immaculate scenes of inarticulate longing.

"[14] Time Out included the film at 16th in their '48 Best Movies of 2023', arguing that it's not flattered by comparisons to the work of Jim Jarmusch and that it "deserves to be discovered on streaming.