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Critics reviews

TIKKUN

Avishai Sivan Israel, 2015
It's the sort of film that divides audiences, with dialogue that appears only sporadically and feels ripped from the pages of an esoteric religious text, and a few images that test the limits of even the most jaded audience. Yet transgressive, button-pushing cinema works best when it's in service of the whole, and "Tikkun" juxtaposes shock with long stillness, a long day's circuitous journey into eternal night.
June 10, 2016
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Sivan's approach is both lyrical and tragic, an indictment of rigid Orthodoxy but a compassionate acknowledgment of the struggle of those who live within it... As seems his wont, Sivan holds a number of surprises on the path toward that end, including Haim's encounter on the road with a young woman, which is nothing less than heartbreaking—too moving and unsettling to give it away beforehand.
June 9, 2016
On one hand, several events, from the initial fall to a climactic incident, seemingly in response to a particularly sinful occurrence that the camera scrutinizes, pose the question of God's continued presence; simultaneously, they blaspheme with such calculation and are telegraphed with such precision that the idea of God's presence becomes laughable. Even the climactic retribution comes with enough dramatic irony to undercut the possibility of divine intervention.
June 8, 2016
...So begins a fascinating and at times morbidly unsettling odyssey, as Haim-Aaron grows distant from his relatives and eventually wanders beyond the confines of his insular community in search of a secular awakening. With its muddy visuals and haunting aura, "Tikkun" gradually shifts from tender to grotesque, and its depiction of a young man struggling against repressive forces evolves into a form of psychological horror.
June 7, 2016
In Jewish tradition, people are made in god's image. In Tikkun, bodies are fearsome, straining on toilets or bleeding on the ground, hands clenched too tight. The movie, slow as life, is curious about how people live through a horror of themselves, the way their bodies betray them and they betray god. Shot like a photo album, gorgeous frame after gorgeous frame, it continually suggests that crisis and struggle can be beautiful when viewed from the right angle.
June 7, 2016
With startling high-def black-and-white photography by Shai Goldman, the film draws on Dreyer's Ordet and Aronofsky's π in a portrayal of spiritual fallout with horror elements. Sivan is wise to resist simple "renunciation of faith" narratives, achieving something more elliptical and unmooring, though the austerity and scarceness of dialogue can grow oppressive (adhering to the notion that sober, rigorous filmmaking must also be airless).
May 3, 2016
The film's austere and provocative look contrasts with the dramatic excitement absent from the film's story—Tikkun's conflict concerns the soul—and compensates at times for its ponderous pacing.
March 17, 2016
Like Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, a neorealist account of life in a Los Angeles ghetto, Tikkun feels like an ethnographic film shot by someone from the community it documents, managing simultaneously to keep a critical distance from the material while maintaining a certain credulity and wonder toward the proceedings.
March 13, 2016
Shot in an arresting black and white in Jerusalem old city (the crew apparently dressed as Hasidim to shot there without being disturbed), atmospheric and very well acted, Tikkun is a powerful film, albeit one that is not shy about exploiting the putative otherness of the ultra-orthodox, including an opening and then recurring scene of the kosher butcher at work.
September 15, 2015