Shelter (VI) (2017)

The film opens with a quotation from Kahlil Gibran. "Life is an island, rocks are its desires, trees its dreams, and flowers its loneliness, and it is in the middle of an ocean of solitude and seclusion." I'm not sure whether that's the exact translation used in the movie. Anyway, the movie shows us two women secluded in a lonely apartment for a good cinematic reason-- one is an agent assigned to keep the other one safe from the bad guys-- while each of them is intent on not only on surviving but on the goal of pursuing a purposeful parental relationship-- nurturing an island of life-- in the face of the ocean of nihilism symbolized by the betrayals and assassinations accompanying international espionage and terrorism.

Writer/director Eran Riklis compares the film to Bergman's Persona because of the intimacy and tension of the relationship between the two women, but I think a closer comparison might be with Coppola's The Rain People, where a woman unsure of herself as a future mother picks up a hitchhiker and finds herself receiving practice in the task of caring for another person.

When the movie ended, a woman in the theater asked me to take one side or the other in a debate with her friend over what actually had happened during the final minutes. The audience is indeed left with some bits to figure out, but I didn't feel seriously cheated. The production was professional, suspense was maintained continuously, and the music-- even if composer Yehonatan Riklis is, one might guess, some kind of relative of the director-- makes a fine, tasteful, enhancement.