'Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem' Movie Review

There's a moment, somewhere past the halfway mark, where Viviane lets her hair down in court. Not metaphorically. She undoes the bun she has worn for the entire film, and a panel of three rabbis goes apoplectic. It's a tiny gesture. It feels like an earthquake. That is how this film works. You sit in one room for almost two hours, and by the end your shoulders are up around your ears.

Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem (2014) is the kind of movie people warn you about and then can't stop talking about. Co-written and co-directed by Israeli siblings Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz, it follows a woman trying to get a divorce in a country where, under Jewish religious law, only the husband can grant one. He refuses. She sits in court for five years. That is the whole movie. About 95% of it takes place inside one tiny rabbinical courtroom and the cramped waiting area outside. No flashbacks. No dream sequences. No relief.

And it is gripping.

Why watch it? Because Ronit Elkabetz, who plays Viviane while also co-writing and co-directing the film, gives one of the great courtroom performances of the last decade. She does almost everything in close-up. The directors mostly stick to mediums and tight frames (a pragmatic choice, given the size of the actual courtroom set), and the few wider shots come from the rabbis' point of view, looking down. You feel the geometry of power in every single frame. The film teaches you to read Viviane's face the way you'd read a poker player's. A flicker of the jaw. A swallowed breath. The way she keeps her eyes locked on the bench while a witness three feet away calls her a bad wife.

Simon Abkarian, as the husband Elisha, is the secret weapon. American audiences may know him as Alex Dimitrios in Casino Royale (the corrupt contractor Bond strangles in the Bahamas) but here he does something completely different. Elisha barely speaks for long stretches. He sits. He stares straight ahead. He tunes Viviane out the way a wall tunes out a fly. When he finally does talk, the room contracts. Abkarian, who trained at Ariane Mnouchkine's Théâtre du Soleil and has played villains and saints in roughly equal measure, makes refusal itself look like a religious act. It's terrifying.

Here's the thing about the Elkabetz siblings. Gett is the third film in a trilogy they made together about Viviane and Elisha's marriage, after To Take a Wife (2004) and Shiva / 7 Days (2008). The first two are domestic. The third one is procedural. They spent a decade telling this one couple's story, and you can feel that decade in every silence between Viviane and her lawyer (a quietly devastating Menashe Noy as Carmel). These are people who have known each other forever, played by actors who actually have. The trilogy as a whole is widely considered one of the most important works in modern Israeli cinema, particularly for the way it centers Mizrahi women, who come from Jewish families with North African and Middle Eastern roots, voices the industry had largely ignored.

What's quietly devastating, and only became publicly known later, is that Ronit Elkabetz was already battling the cancer that would kill her while she made this film. She died in April 2016, just two years after Gett premiered, at the age of 51. Her brother Shlomi later made a documentary called The Black Notebooks (2021) which addresses her illness during the production. Knowing this, you watch the film differently. The exhaustion in Viviane's body isn't only acting. It is also a great actress giving everything she had left to a role about a woman who refuses to disappear quietly.

The film picked up the Ophir Award (Israel's equivalent of the Oscar) for Best Film, was Israel's official submission for the 87th Academy Awards Best Foreign Language Film category, and earned a Golden Globe nomination in the same category. It premiered in the Directors' Fortnight at Cannes in 2014, then traveled to TIFF, and the international press kept reaching for the same comparisons: 12 Angry Men, Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, Kafka. They are all fair.

If there's a knock on the film, it's that the repetition is the point and the repetition can also wear you out. Hearing for the eighth time that Elisha didn't show up to his own hearing is meant to feel maddening, because it is maddening, but a viewer in the wrong mood can mistake the mimicry of bureaucracy for actual bureaucracy. This is a film that asks you to sit in the same chair Viviane is stuck in. If you want a cathartic third-act blowout, calibrate your expectations. The catharsis here is small, hard-won, and arrives at a price.

Things to watch for: the way the camera waits inside the empty courtroom before anyone enters, the rare moments when light enters the frame from a window and feels like contraband, the use of subtitles for languages spoken inside Israel (Hebrew, French, Arabic) and what each language reveals about who has power in the room. Watch for Eli Gorenstein as the head rabbi Solomon, whose voice is the first thing you hear in the film before you ever see him. And watch for that hair-down moment. You'll know it when it lands.

This is a film about a courtroom that is really a film about a marriage that is really a film about a country that is really a film about every woman who has ever asked permission to leave. Two hours. One room. Stays with you.