A favorite at the Venice Film Festival, Eitan Zur’s debut feature is a tight, edgy Israeli film noir that packs a wallop of an unexpected finale. Radiant Melanie Peres plays the title character, a 28-year-old book illustrator married to the esteemed and portly Ilan, a science professor and popular TV host who is 30 years her senior. Arriving home late one night, Ilan becomes suspicious when he finds his wife gone but her mobile phone left behind. He calls his closest confidants to get their usual commiseration: his mother and his best friend, the weary cop, Anton. When Naomi returns home, she proffers a perfectly logical explanation for her whereabouts. The next day, he randomly spots Naomi and follows her to a beachfront studio where he discovers she actually is having an affair with another artist. He returns to the studio, confronts the young painter and finds himself at a point of no return. Ilan finds an unlikely ally in his mother who helps her son with his predicament. An homage to the thrillers of Hitchcock (Ilan and his mother are a mirror image of Claude Rains and Leopoldine Konstantin in Notorious), it also features a heaping dose of repressed Jewish guilt leading to a final plot twist that is unpredictable yet somehow inevitable.
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