The Day After I'm Gone

If you're the type that thrives on sorrow and abject misery, then you'll probably enjoy this. utterly, utterly depressing.

The depressing atmosphere was fitting the movie and I do think it was important to understand the way things are being treated in this family, but the movie missed either a closure or some kind of a saying. Even if the purpose of the film was to say that sometimes life just doesn't have any solutions, resolutions, or a closure, I still think that a movie of this kind should not leave out a progression of a plot.

I enjoyed most of it - but on the other hand I think it's a miss.

While this is not my type of drama, I watched it because it was filmed in Israel. So I loved seeing the scenes of Tel-Aviv and out in the mountains. It's a story of a father and daughter who are on completely different paths and seem to never communicate with each other. I felt the depiction of families in Israel was very accurate, love, caring, and pain.

Nimrod Eldar is credited as this movie's writer, director, sound designer, and editor. All four of them are very talented, but I wouldn't say they work perfectly together.

Eldar's script is a tense, naturalistic, well-acted family drama focused on a widower and his daughter. The father is a zoo veterinarian, and the first line of the movie is spoken by the unmistakable Yigal Horowitz, a real veterinarian who is famous for treating wild animals in a program in Israeli educational TV. His presence seems like a wink at the audience and generates an expectation of light-heartedness that the script certainly doesn't fulfill. Similarly, the man-mountain Eran Naim, playing a policeman, is sort of a distracting cross-over from the films of Yaron Shani, where he's repeatedly played essentially the same role.

The patient at the zoo is a beautiful leopard. Eldar the director also makes a point of presenting a beautiiful amusement-park ride and some beautiful shots of the Dead Sea area. There are even some facial close-ups that are notable for their artistry. But instead of reinforcing the drama or providing welcome relief from the tension, these visuals call attention to themselves at the expense of audience involvement. The same might be said for some of the long pauses that Eldar the editor has inserted, while Eldar the sound designer has wisely eschewed background music almost entirely but occasionally overdone the sound effects.

I certainly recommend the movie, but overall, it could be that Eldar the director didn't sufficiently trust Eldar the screenwriter and tried to load more ornamentation onto the script than it would bear. It certainly is a bleak story, most of the time, but a director's got to play the hand he's been dealt, even if the game is solitaire.

The film can be summed up with 3 words: sitting, silence and talking. And that's about it. There is barely any drama in this film. You don't feel attached to any of the characters. The lead actor, who plays the father, seems like a monotone lifeless cardboard cutout. He shows virtually no emotion. And his daughter is much the same. It's a tragedy that there are so many directors who haven't got the foggiest clue how to make an engaging film even when they have a low budget. You won't miss anything if you don't watch this film. Your time would be better spent watching something like cat videos instead.