Who Killed Alex Odeh?

Sharply handled, poignant, and deeply troubling, Osder and Youmans’ documentary is both an intimate portrait of irreparable loss and a forceful examination of extremism’s enduring consequences. For those left behind, the injustice does not belong to the past. It continues every day.

What the documentary finds, or at least calls new attention towards, is alternately eye-opening, obvious, and eye-opening for its obviousness.

It’s striking, haunting stuff, stark reminders of the virulence of such religious hatred, which ripples out from its Reagan-era political roots into the bloody present.

Who Killed Alex Odeh? takes on too much for its slim 83-minute runtime. Odeh is more a symbol than a three-dimensional figure. The documentary is more workmanlike than inspired, although Osder and Youmans ensure that its title has a deeper, barbed meaning. The directors aren’t trying to solve a murder so much as they want the world to keep asking the question.