Fill the Void

This is an extraordinary first film, nerve-tingling in its intensity, and assembled with a finesse and control even the great Austrian director Michael Haneke might envy.

Beautiful and mysterious, the[se] first glimpses are an ideal primer for the Israeli film, which never rushes to spell out the meanings of its subtle and quiet moments.

It's an artful, character-driven drama that constitutes a minor miracle of empathy.

Burshtein creates a one-of-a-kind portrait that nonetheless transcends its setting, and even its worldview; the dynamics are global.

Burshtein has achieved a gripping film without victims or villains, an ambiguous tragedy drawing on universal themes of love and loss, self-sacrifice and self-preservation.

[Burshtein] vividly depicts a clannish culture that is likely to feel foreign and perhaps off-putting to generations that came of age in a progressive post-feminist era.

Burhstein's slow-paced, carefully edited work illuminates concepts of filial piety, female agency, and patriarchy.

It's not a great movie, but it's a humane and touching one.

Emotional issues an an insular world

A man and a woman, alone, on a path at night, forbidden to touch, speak, confront, describe passion: the man moves closer. That's all. The smallest of moves, infinitesimal motion. The world tilts on its axis.

...an entertaining yet uneven debut from a promising new filmmaker...

As opposed to the bleak view of sexual subjugation in Kadosh, Amos Gitai's 1999 film about Hasidic marriage, Fill the Void sees Burshtein fortrightly and wittily asserting that this is how her community lives.