Suicidio (Hitabdut)

What seemed like a good story was hard to follow with the haphazard editing. The movie jumps from scene to scene without any logical cohesiveness. While you are trying to figure out who's who in a scene it has skipped two more scenes. You quickly lose the ability to define who is good or bad and after a while you do not even care.

Slow and complicated scenario. It keeps you waiting for something big to happen but the ending is not really satisfactory. There are some parts that are intriguing but, as a whole movie it has flaws with credibility.

Losing a loved one (much more so a husband) is not something that can be taken lightly ... on the other hand, when that said husband has not been entirely upfront and honest with one ... but I'm getting ahead of myself. Something that the movie is doing too in a sense. Just to unravel what has happened up until that point.

Not just because there is another movie that is similar to this plot wise (one of the best thrillers in the 90s), you probably will be able to guess where this is heading. And while this probably never reaches those heights for you ... I'd argue that it is still quite the good movie and thriller. Not sure I'd call it an action thriller ... but then again I'd leave that up to others to make up their own mind. May be a bit too complicated for its own good, but it still works if you let it.

Before you write a review, you're warned that if you write a spoiler without warning readers, you'll be blacklisted and all your future reviews will be blocked from appearing. How ironic, then, that IMDb has spoiled viewers' enjoyment of Benny Fredman's excellent debut movie by giving away too much in its three line synopsis.

The film is set in Jerusalem. It starts with Dafna (the coolly beautiful Mali Levi) torching her husband's music and video store in which the husband lies dead, gun in hand. It appears to be a suicide, hence the title, but a very unorthodox police detective suspects Dafna may have killed hubbie, a loser who was massively in debt to Muki, a terrifying gangster who's given him a tight deadline to pay up. Muki threatens not only him but his family.

Muki operates from a junk yard. He has a bizarre obsession with William Tell and the apple on the head of Tell's son, and is attended by two frightening thugs even balder than himself. One of them has no right eye (when I saw it the film was entitled "Eye for an Eye.") He's not Eyeless in Gaza but Eyeless in Jerusalem, and how he came to lose the eye provides the film's most gruesome scene.

To say more would spoil your enjoyment. What makes the film so intriguing is that it hops around in time, and you're never sure what Dafna is up to or how she feels about her husband (her mother's attitude is "Divorce the bum.")

All in all a first-rate thriller, though perhaps a tad too long.

Oded is in too much trouble. Business situation leads tax police and cruel thugs after him. His business partner is too nervous, and jealous (at some point expresses directly that Oded's wife should have chosen him) mother-in-law never took him seriously... Now meet his wife: very smart and courageous, yet she knows absolutely nothing of his troubles with business and the thugs. The bastards in the movie are too nasty. 50% of the plot would have been enough to tell the story, there is too much of everything, you lose track but you start predicting the main outcome.

In short, if you are looking for a thriller to watch this will do, but prepare for unnecessary complications to come with it.