Critic Reviews

Wedding Doll may be a small film, but it's deftly executed and built on two remarkable leading performances.

In his first narrative feature, documentarian Nitzan Gilady demonstrates an assured grasp of visual storytelling, using a stunningly rugged desert setting that’s as much a character as the film’s perpetually sunny, intellectually challenged 24-year-old and her world-weary mother.

The bittersweet and gently moving Wedding Doll sidesteps so many of the traps it sets for itself because writer-director Nitzan Gilady is less interested in the purity of his heroine than he is in what it reveals from within the people around her.

It is a sad little tale but one that manages to find notes of hope amongst the setbacks and rejections of everyday life.

Though the darker tonal shift toward the end is a bit jarring, director/scenarist Gilady demonstrates a deft, confident hand with the storytelling, cast and general packaging, and makes assertive use of the dramatic desert setting.

Gilady never treats her heroine as a prop in someone else's redemption arc, and Rosenblatt's performance will have you looking for her work in other films.

Wedding Doll is a small film with a unique take on coming of age and finding one's own place in a world that's often unwelcoming to people who are different.

I suppose the fact that I was affected as I was by Wedding Doll is testimony to its emotional effectiveness. But while Hagit is able to crack a smile at the movie’s end, I feel a pall wrapping around me every time I contemplate her predicament, or the predicament of her real-life models.

Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.

In spite of all Wedding Doll’s strengths, its scenario comes to seem a little unseemly: Giladi establishes Hagit’s hopes and dreams mostly just to show the terrible ways that they’re dashed.