Warning! This movie is really, really good and this partial review spoils major plot points. I would advise not watching any trailers nor reading any reviews before going in.

The foxtrot is a dance where, “No matter where you go, you always end up in the same spot.” Michael Feldman explains this to his wife Dafna, late in the film Foxtrot, as he performs the steps in their modern Tel Aviv apartment. Right step, then back step, left step, front. Then right step again, then back step, left step, then front. Ad infinitum. . .

In the film’s first step, Michael and Dafna receive a knock at their door. Dafna opens it, looking straight into the lens, only to faint into a backdrop of spiraling squares. It’s the Israeli military, their very presence needs no explanation. With disquieting efficiency, Dafna is administered a sedative shot and carried to the bedroom. This leaves Michael alone with the officers, the pressure of shock and grief collapsing in him, as they explain that his son Jonathan was killed in action.

We learn that Michael is an architect by trade. Fittingly, he’s framed in disorienting spaces (some of which he likely designed) as he fails to compartmentalize this trauma, and we later learn, traumas awoken from the past. We witness Michael meet with his mother suffering from dementia, his brother, his sister-in-law and his own daughter, each encounter revealing a rapid retreat inwards that is visualized externally.

Michael seems on the verge of imploding irreparably when he gets another knock at his door. There’s been a mistake. A clerical error. It turns out that Jonathan is safe, it was a different boy who was KIA. This prompts Michael to instead explode, demanding his son be returned home at once. And then the film takes its next step.

Director Samuel Maoz utilizes nearly every tool in cinema’s arsenal to execute a severe formalism that pivots radically from tone to tone, act to act, character to character. It’s difficult to overstate just how jarring these shifts are during the experience. This film is a total assault of mise-en-scene, cinematography, music and editing, even space and time, which I found exhilarating.

On one level Foxtrot functions as a family tragedy, a reckoning between mankind and fate. On another, it’s an anti-war film, about the latent violence inflicted on every party in a conflict. But on its grandest scale, Foxtrot is depicting a multi-generational disillusionment of the Israeli project, a national identity crisis in progress. Maoz’s remarkable film acts like a mirror, or maybe a prism, refracting the entire dance across time.