Critic Reviews

In the long list of movies about death, this is one of the most original in recent memory, if for its emotional delicacy in sparing us hollow, tear-gushing grandiosity, and for its attitude on life: In most movies about grief, you are waiting for the characters to cry. This is a marvelous story about loss in which you are waiting for them to laugh.

Rambling in the best manner imaginable, it’s an amusingly heartbreaking (and hopeful) portrait of misery’s messiness.

One Week and a Day succeeds in recreating that precise feeling, as hard to articulate as it is commonly felt, where exhaustion wears down any line between emotions.

One Week and a Day keeps an impeccable balance between absurdity and sadness, comedy and heartbreak. Increasingly outrageous but always plausible, it applies its pitiless, pitch black sense of humor to a very particular situation.

The strength of Asaph Polonsky’s debut feature, One Week and a Day (Shavua Ve Yom), is that it’s actually a bittersweet comedy-drama in which the pain is as real as the frequent chuckles.

The film is a comedy that depicts the difficult period of transition from mourning back into normal life.

The comedy in One Week and a Day comes from confusion, ineptitude, and alienation. It comes from people’s defenses being way, way down. It doesn’t cheapen the tragedy. It grounds it, sometimes in the mud.

This sentimental film takes things one step at a time.

One Week And A Day is at times a genuinely funny diversion amongst the Critic’s Week selection. However, a sentimental streak and a series of precocious narrative turns diminish the impact of the film.

It meanders from start to finish, searching for a tone that it never quite finds.