One of the great gifts of art is empathy. Movies can make us feel for their characters, and great movies can make us understand characters we never imagined we had anything in common with. They extend our experiences and turn us into wiser, more forgiving human beings. The new film by Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad stretches our horizons far enough to include some of the most reviled people on the planet. "Paradise Now" is a shocking, eye-opening attempt at understanding the minds and hearts of suicide bombers.

Abu-Assad, who made 2003's incisive drama "Rana's Wedding," is a sophisticated filmmaker who appears to have absorbed the rhythms of the best American independent cinema. The opening scenes of "Paradise Now" have the quiet, understated feel of Jim Jarmusch, transplanted from the Lower East Side to Nablus, the West Bank city where Said (Kais Nashef) and Khaled (Ali Suliman) go about their lives. They half-heartedly work at the car repair shop and chill with the hookah while they listen to tapes nicked from customers' cars. If it weren't for the occasional rocket blast in the distance, these guys could be anywhere: mellow, shaggy-haired members of the international brotherhood of slackers.

All of this changes when Said and Khaled receive word that it is time; they have volunteered for a suicide mission, to slip into Tel Aviv and detonate explosives strapped to their bodies on a crowded bus. Their slacker-like detachment doesn't come from the ironic distance of a Williamsburg hipster, but from the knowledge that their time will be up soon. Life under the occupation was never livable to them in the first place. When Khaled says, "I am already dead," his stare is so horribly absent that we have no choice but to believe him. The men are bathed, shaved, put into suits and outfitted with a bomb jacket which they can trigger by pulling on a ripcord. They tape their "martyr videos" and eat a last supper.

These preparations interrupt the barely blossoming relationship between Said and Suha (Lubna Azabal), the daughter of a celebrated martyr who just returned to Palestine. Western audiences will find it easy to identify with her outsider's disbelief at the reality of life in the West Bank. Suha's vehement opposition to suicide attacks points to a possible way out of Said and Khaled's dilemma: while the men believe that "the occupation defines the resistance," she insists that a non-violent alternative is possible. Nonetheless, Said and Khaled slip into Israel as planned, but they get separated at the fence. Faced with their deadly choice by themselves, confused and lost, they have to reexamine the reasons for their murderous plans.

Shot on location under dangerous conditions, "Paradise Now" feels both realistic and fictional. The awful reality of the situation is driven home through conventions we can recognize--the pining mother, the botched mission, the last-minute love affair, and the humor that somehow always finds its way into the most serious moments. "Paradise Now" goes down easy but is difficult to digest. Abu-Assad makes it possible to understand how a person, driven by desperation, hatred, and shame, might end up committing the most heinous acts. But understanding is not the same as sympathy or forgiveness.