Suicide (2014) Reviews

• Intriguing Israeli thriller

  tony-70-6679202016-04-02

  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.

• Did NOT Have Me on the Edge of My Seat, but Watchable

  ikeybabe2017-01-31

  Thriller? Nah. Suspenseful? Kinda. Overall, this film was confusing. Maybe because I had to read the English subtitles and at times they disappeared from the screen too quickly. There was definitely a mystery going on here. The characters were decent - ice cold lawyer chick, loving irresponsible dad, controlling and disapproving mother/mother-in- law and an evil time-obsessed gangster. I had a hard time believing the married couple - Oded and Dafna - were really in love. They seemed to have no chemistry in their scenes together. Muki, the deplorable bad guy, played his role quite well because you could easily hate him. The back and forth between the crime/cop interrogation and the unraveling of what happened was somewhat disjointed. If I looked away for a moment, I usually had to replay that scene to figure out what was going on. Overall, the acting was decent. The script was somewhat intriguing, but there are some definite slow scenes that dragged on. The ending had the right kind of closing and was satisfying.

• Too complicated, too much

  lenusik_992016-11-25

  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.