It doesn‘t require a lot of words to pull the rug out from characters‘s feet and let the audience in on the story. A road somewhere in the desert. A doorbell, two soldiers in uniform, a woman fainting. Another son of a family dies on the front. Somewhere in no man‘s land on the edges of the Gaza Strip. What follows is routine. While his wife Daphne (Sarah Adler) is incapacitated by sleeping pills for 4 hours, Michael Feldmann (Lior Ashkenazi) has to face reality. That‘s what‘s expected of him as a man. The facts, the formalities, the officer that is organizing the funeral, the relatives who are dealing with their own grief – and he has to drink water in between whenever the cell alarm goes off. It‘s a shocklng but sad reality how militarily professional this works. But then there‘s a mistake and the construct begins to falter. Samuel Maoz changes the tone of his second feature film many times. Grief and processing are at the center in the first act. Then the plot changes up and shows the absurd situation in the remote border post where the son was stationed. Lastly, it returns to the apartment during another time period. Viewers have to find the time indicators for themselves. But the attention is rewarded and the artful images by Giora Bejach are as arresting as the performance by Lior Ashkenazi who most recently seen playing Yitzhak Rabin in 7 DAYS IN ENTEBBE. Samuel Maoz fought in the 1982 Lebanon War as a young man. After processing the events in his debut LEBANON which won him the 2009 Golden Lion in Venice, he is now dealing with the painful senselessness of war in a masterful way.

Lars Tunçay

Translation: Elinor Lewy