The Bouncer

The characters here aren't deep, but they're intense. As the publicity explains, the protagonist needs to finance fertility treatments for his wife and so, reluctantly, he takes a job as a strong-arm collector of grey-market debts. Moris Cohen, who won the national best-actor award for this film, seems ready to inherit the mantle of the late Amos Lavie and the aging Uri Gavriel as the Israeli who can play big scary guys with sensitive souls. He comes out from behind the shadow of his wife, actress Rotem Zissman-Cohen (the female lead), who was previously prominent in many more movies and had several national award nominations herself. Much has been made of the fact that while playing a couple still trying after several years of fertility treatments, they were in real life still trying after several years of fertility treatments; and they succeeded just in time to add a retroactive glow to the movie's release. Their characters, as I started to say, are defined pretty simply by way of what they are trying to achieve, and the movie sets up the protagonist's conflicting relationships with a number of other simply drawn characters in the violent world he has to navigate; it's the conflict itself, rather than any sophisticated characterizations, that carries the movie along and builds into high suspense toward the ending. The story is unrelieved by humor, the movie features one song and apparently it's a deliberately mediocre one, but audiences are drawn in by the acting, the pacing, the sense of authenticity, and the protagonist's understandable grim dilemmas.