A political thriller that unfolds during the British Mandate in 1930s Tel Aviv, following two British police officers, Thomas Wilkin and Geoffrey Morton, in their hunt for poet and Zionist activist Avraham Stern, who is plotting to evict British authorities.

Credits: TheMovieDb.

Film Cast:

• Thomas Wilkin: Douglas Booth
• Geoffrey Morton: Harry Melling
• Shoshana Borochov: Irina Starshenbaum
• Alice Morton: Gina Bramhill
• Avraham Stern: Aury Alby
• Luba Borochov: Liudmyla Vasylieva
• Robert Chambers: Ian Hart
• Ralph Cairns: Oliver Chris
• Shlomo Ben Yosef: Gal Mizrav
• Harold Macmichael: Tim Wallers
• Efrain Ilin: Aliosha Massine
• David Shomron: Samuel Kay
• Benjamin Zeroni: Doron Kochavi
• Arieh Yitzhaki: Yotam Ishay
• Yuri Eisner: Avi Golomb
• Roni Stern: Irene Paloma Jona
• Zelik Zak: Gianmarco Vettori
• David Raziel: Daniel Donskoy
• Tova Zvorai: Camilla Calderoni
• Schiff: Rony Herman
• Leonid: Aaron Vodovoz
• Lubinsky: Ariel Nil Levy
• Vicar: Tim Daish
• Police Interrogator 1: Lee Comley
• Police Interrogator 2: Matthew Thomas-Robinson
• …: Matthew T. Reynolds

Film Crew:

• Producer: Michael Winterbottom
• Screenplay: Laurence Coriat
• Production Design: Sergio Tribastone
• Producer: Andrew Eaton
• Director of Photography: Giles Nuttgens
• Costumer: Anthony Unwin

Movie Reviews:

• CinemaSerf: This is a curiously undercooked iteration of a story that well exemplifies that expression about one man’s terrorist being another’s freedom fighter. It’s the underwhelming Douglas Booth who is Wilkin, a police detective based in British-administered Palestine and a man who has a semblance of decency to him. His boss “Chambers” (Ian Hart) is a bit more of a player, though – and he drafts in the much more “hands-on” Morton (the unremarkable Harry Melling) to get results more quickly – not least the apprehension of Stern (Aury Alby) who is determined to establish a Jewish homeland and doesn’t much care which tactics he uses to accomplish that. The personal story is largely historical fact, so there’s no real jeopardy here, but it’s an interesting postulation on just how the British tried to administer a region and a population that had no interest in being administered, and that was being logistically manipulated with the shortest of term vision for anyone’s future. Palestinian and Jew could agree on just one thing – get the UK out, but thereafter there was little consensus as the bombs and the bullets continued to fly. To be honest, I found the contribution of the eponymous woman (Irina Starshenbaum) to be almost incidental to what is essentially a rather dryly brutal story of a territory that always has been and will be fought over. It looks fine, but somehow it’s all just a little too bitty – episodic, even, and it needed a bigger hitter to deliver the narrative more engagingly and convincingly. Pity.