Ahed’s Knee

A predictably worthless endeavor from Nadav Lapid, Ahed’s Knee follows a filmmaker (Avshalom Pollak’s Y) as he arrives in a small town to show his latest movie and subsequently engages in a battle of wills with his host (Nur Fibak’s Yahalom). It’s a reasonable premise that’s employed as a springboard for a series of aggressively oddball and pointless sequences, as director Nadav Lapid, working from his own screenplay, delivers a sluggish and predominantly interminable drama that does, for the most part, pummel the viewer with distractingly off-kilter elements – including (and especially) an ongoing emphasis on scenes and interludes that may or may not be entirely in the central character’s head (ie it becomes impossible, given the proliferation of nonsensical digressions, to discern what’s actually happening and what’s just imaginary). There is, as such, little doubt that one’s efforts at connecting to Y’s far-from-enthralling exploits fall flat to an increasingly distressing degree, and it’s clear, too, that the picture is eventually dominated by eye-rollingly didactic diatribes that are, to put it mildly, far from subtle – with the growing focus on such moments ensuring that Ahed’s Knee, particularly in its second half, comes off as an amateurish and thoroughly irrelevant piece of work that cements Lapid’s place as an almost astonishingly incompetent filmmaker.

1/2* out of ****