Review of Shelter

"Shelter" is a new Israeli short-story based movie from 2017 written and directed by Eran Riklis. The case has some names that will sound familiar to film fans, but apart from the performance by Neta Riskin most of the time, this movie was a major disappointment. It may have had partially to do with me watching the German dub version and this was realy not done well, but there were other more objective component too that I found downright awful. One would be the editing, which seemed wquite a mess. The jumps between different times, different countries, different rooms etc. felt all extremely shoody to me. The acting like I wrote was not the worst about this movie, but not too great either. There are definite moments of overacting, but this also has to do with the dialogues itself and I am not even sure if you can blame any of the actors here, especially the two actresses at the center of it all. The film had problems from the beginning. I think the ways in which the audiences was thrown inside the story so quickly, with hardly any elaboration on the main characters, any presentation of the situation just felt wrong for so many reasons. The inclusion of attracted neighbors, old ladies and a fire felt all for the sake of it and did not add any dramatic relevance at all for me. It felt as if Riklis used all the known formulas that worked in so many other films, but gave it all the wrong approaches and the final execution is on a level where I just wish i could unsee this film. The best example is also the dream sequence. It may not have been entirely predictable that it is not real, but it just felt shoddy, again maybe because of the editing. When we see the two with heaby make-up ready to party, it doesn't fit in. When the main character opens the door to anybody despite acting so seriously about letting absolutely nobody in, it basically mocks the entire movie and all characters at the center of it. And don't even get me started about the lesbian kiss scene. If we cannot convince anybody with the plot and (complete lack of sufficient) attention to detail, lets get at least some men in the audience horny. The pretty stunning main character here may be nice to look at, but well it's a movie, not a photo shoot. When finally I thought that there was some solid decision, some bravery from the makers to kill off one of the two, they revoked it eventually and made things even worse. The background story with the dead man and the attempts at pregnancy never makes an emotional impact either. Same for the shootout at the end that would have been an insult to almost every lifetime movie. And very creative the inclusion of the name "Avner" too. I say definitely skip this film and watch Spielberg's Munich instead.