Image from the film Policeman. Photo / Supplied
Formally meticulous, even austere, the assured feature debut of Israeli film-maker Lapid announces the arrival of a significant talent.
This is a film of masterful control: in the way it shuns the high-speed cliches of the thriller genre, it recalls Kubrick; its sense of menace puts you in mind of
Hitchcock; and there's something of Michael Haneke in the clinical detachment of its point of view.
An elliptical, but never obscure, narrative comprises two stories that intersect dramatically in the last reel. The first part concerns Yaron (Klein), the buff, macho alpha male in an elite anti-terrorism police unit that specialises in undercover (and apparently extra-judicial) hits on Arab targets.
Lapid observes this tight-knit group with a cool fascination bordering on the homo-erotic - in a scene where they meet at a barbecue, the bare-skin slaps of their embraces sound like gunshots - though there is nothing reverential in his attitude: a subplot makes it plain that perjury and corruption are part of the group's modus operandi and Yaron, an expectant father, is equal parts attentive husband and self-preening narcissist (when he shows his pistol to a waitress and invites her to touch it, she pouts and says, "Touch what?").
Around the film's mid-point, we are suddenly introduced to a cadre of young radicals - not incidentally they are Jewish, not Palestinian - who are planning to advance their class-warfare campaign by taking hostages at a society wedding.
