CineUropa Review: HOUSES, Berlinale 2025, Forum

Excluding Houses [+], very few contemporary Israeli films are shot in black and white; with filmmaker Veronica Nicole Tetelbaum and her DoP Yaniv Linton also utilising a square aspect ratio to complement their deft chiaroscuro, they’re able to visually impart the pit of anguish and self-loathing afflicting swathes of Israeli society, and to show the unsteady foundations that broad national identity and unity have been built upon. One of the most impressive features in the Berlinale’s Forum this year, and containing many appealing and timely elements connecting it to global trends in art cinema, Tetelbaum’s debut still enters an understandably hostile festival and distribution market for Israeli films; for one, in this critic’s home territory of the UK, Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee [+] was the last Israeli film programmed at BFI London to date.

Solely written by Tetelbaum, Houses melds the actual, the speculative and the historic, carefully marshalling a number of dramaturgical strands to create a sober emotional pay-off. First seen ambling into a derelict apartment block in the pouring sleet, young non-binary person Sasha (Yael Eisenberg) has quit his job and set off on a physical and interior journey to correct a schism in his past. With his family having emigrated from the collapsed Soviet Union when he was a child, and their unstable footing forcing them to move regularly across northern Israel, Sasha wants to visit his old homes, whether actually occupied with residents in the present or not. In an eerily poetic sense easily accessed by the audience, he can be a further visiting ghost in these spectral environs, revisiting these potently charged spaces in actuality, rather than his memories.

Sasha is also nursing his memory of being abused by his mentor at primary school, whose cruel and domineering attitudes, demanding for one that he speak Hebrew, rather than Russian, we see through fragments of 1990s-style camcorder footage (where Sasha notably exists as a girl, rather than his current preference). Also, when he returns to the school in the present day and meets the current principal, his record seems to have vanished from the system. With one of his houses now owned by the queer goldsmith Anna (Tali Sharon), she understands Sasha’s need for sanctuary and provides a temporary safe haven – plus the growing possibility of physical intimacy, arising from their mutual trust and empathy – until his worried mother, Nina (Evegnia Dodina), shows up on her doorstep. With Sasha and Nina conversing in Russian when reunited, the labyrinth, through which our identities are constantly undergoing reformation, shows its slanted walls closing in.

Early viewers of Houses have pertinently argued that Sasha’s trans identity takes on an overly metaphorical value – that him merely being a trans protagonist, an uncomplicated key focus of audience identification, isn’t enough. Yet Tetelbaum – a cis filmmaker, we should add – somehow oversteps this relevant accusation both through the ultimate durability of the film’s ideas and through its ever-shifting découpage where Sasha’s dead dog can be reanimated as a companion. What’s more, high- and low-res digital lensing almost romantically intermingle, all showing an essential disquiet within Israel, whose insistence on conformity and silence for its internal citizens also determines its stance towards its neighbours. 

Houses is a production by Israel and Germany, staged by Marker Films, Zwillingfilm and Bona Productions.

https://cineuropa.org/en/newsdetail/474175/