By Cáit Murphy

Michal Vinik’s multilingual second feature unfurls intensely and precisely as it sensitively frames the tempestuous relationships of two Ukrainian sisters seeking a better life in Israel. Valeria (Dasha Tvoronovich) is indeed getting married, but something feels off in the film’s opening shot of a woman’s silhouette in a frosted window and turbulent string score, as Christina (Lena Fraifeld), a Russian-speaking beauty salon worker, collects the bride from the airport. 

Valeria is only meeting her husband, an Israeli, for the first time in person after Skyping—and, disconcertingly, she doesn’t understand Hebrew. Christina’s husband Michael (Yaakov Zada Daniel), also Israeli, is controlling (she does the cooking and that’s that), a quality underlined by his running an online matchmaking service. For his part, sweet-hearted but naive Eitan (Avraham Shalom Levi), Michael’s client, is desperate to marry Valeria. But despite initially going along with the plan, Valeria is wary of mimicking her sister’s choices, leading to frustration for all involved.   

Set over a single stormy day, Valeria presents people who desire a better quality of life, job security, or love. Here, the price of citizenship is not just monetary: autonomy and romance are compromised as well (Christina polishes over her dissatisfaction like her customers’ nails). The characters’ moralities aren’t dictated to us, offering instead layers of humiliation and pressure, evoking aspects of Asghar Farhadi’s cinema. In one effective scene at the family dinner table, Valeria describes a childhood memory of her mother giving her and Christina two baby chicks, one disfigured, the other not; sensible Christina chose the “good” one. But Christina—whom the film really spotlights—walks on eggshells between pleasing her husband and helping her sister, culminating in a state of doubt over her marriage, conveyed by her rebelliously smoking in the car, something Michael would surely condemn.

Cait Murphy