Surrogate

It takes a true artist to make a thing of beauty out of disturbing material. Tali Shalom Ezer’s lyrical film tells the story of Eli, a profoundly damaged 32-year-old man incapable of physical touch, who recoils even when his beloved nephew holds his hand. Enter Hagar, a surrogate assigned by Eli’s therapist to help him practice emotional and sexual intimacy in a controlled environment. The two meet weekly in an airy “bedroom,” a safe space where Eli can begin to process his relationships with his fawning mother and intense sister, as well as the crushing secrets from his past. Ezer delivers her gracefully paced story with supreme confidence, expertly supported by Radek Ladczuk’s gorgeous cinematography. The acting, meanwhile, is uniformly superb, particularly Amir Wolf (Eli) and Lana Ettinger (Hagar), whose portrayal of two strangers meeting under artificial circumstances to create transformative human connection is pitch-perfect and mesmerizing.