Hed

This is largely a character study of a man who works hard at doing the right thing and doesn't have particularly sensitive emotional antennae. Isn't doing the right thing more important, and shouldn't it be sufficient? The proposition (and how it fails to work out) is enough to carry a movie, and along with first-rate acting it does carry this one; but there are a few flaws too. As the IMDB storyline says, "Avner suspects his wife Ella of having an affair. Secretly recording her telephone conversations, he turns into a spy in his own home, listening to them again and again." The movie returns repeatedly to conversations he's already listened to, and it advances the arc by letting us hear a little more of what Avner has already heard. An intrusively artificial device. A better script would have perched us on Avner's shoulder and let us learn details as he learns them, rather than informing us later of what he learned earlier. Another problem, perhaps relevant only in Israel, is the casting of Guri Alfi. It's not his first role in a dramatic movie, but still he's much more familiar as a TV wisecracker, and there is near-zero room for lightheartedness in the character he plays here. I think that someone known for serious roles, or not even well known at all, would have been better accepted by the audience (regardless of the quality of the performance).

My wife came with me to see this movie although a girlfriend of hers had warned that it's not very good. My wife didn't like it either. I guess it's a movie for men. In a chick flick, after all, it's the women whose motivations the audience is supposed to identify with while the men's motivations are simplistically obvious. unfathomable, or just not worth thinking about. In "Echo," the woman's motivations function as part of the mystery.