Dir: Doron Oren | Thriller Israel 93’
Selma Blair stars in this gripping siege thriller that brings alive the sheer terror and torture the Israeli hostages suffered after the militant group Hamas invaded Israel, murdering nearly 2000 citizens and seizing 251 of them on October 7 2023, launching the full scale war between Israel and Hamas (who control the Palestinians).
Based on the true story of Alon Shamriz, Yotam Haim, and Samara Talalka we discover how men and women were not merely held captive, they were taunted, brutalised, raped and sexually abused. The humiliation is graphic and the three leads Shamiriz, Chai, and Tallaka are threatened with beheadings, scalpings and worse. Selma Blair plays a woman who is held captive with her little daughter, where one woman claims she has been hung upside down by her ankles before being raped.
The focus here is the fear factor although the director Doron Oren does not quail away from the showing images of the violence involved including whippings and actual beheadings.
The plot turns on a Hebrew-speaking Bedouin (a Muslim, Israeli citizen) who Hamas places in the cells, along with the Israelis, where he is ordered to spy on them and relate intelligence to the Hamas gangleader. But he gradually befriends the internees; and they all collaborate on an clever escape plan.
Essentially a chamber piece there are occasional glimpses of the outside where the war continues to rage, bombs are falling on the already devastated Gaza landscape.
The Hamas chief exhorts them to appeal to prime minister Netanyahu for their release and they each take part in pleas to camera, DoP Danor Glazer making imaginative use of the claustrophobic surroundings that gradually widen out into an open battlefield.
The three men fight for their lives when out in the open where their survival hangs on a thread. Sadly the director gives away the outcome, but you’ll have to see the film to find out what happens in the devastating finale of the first film that deals with events in Gaza from the Israeli POV. @MeredithTaylor
In cinemas end November 2025