This is a superb movie -- reminiscent of A Pearl Among Rubies in its depiction of a woman's plight in the Orthodox Jewish community. It may, however, be a more difficult film than a Pearl Among Rubies for a non-Jew to understand or credit. Kadosh focuses on the situation of two sisters in a religious culture that expects women to produce children and to devote all their energies to raising them and to caring for their husbands while the husbands spend full time studying Torah and Talmud. One of the sisters has been married for 10 years but has never conceived and is therefore considered a failure in her primary responsibility as a wife (though it's quite possible that the husband is the one who is sterile) Her younger sister is betrothed and soon married to a man she does not love and who is mainly interested in impregnating her, not in making love to her. I won't spoil the plot by spelling out what happens to them. I'm sure this will seem unbelievable to those who have never encountered the Ultra Orthodox communities [stress the plural; they are not identical] in Israel. Could this story happen? Among the more intransigent sects? I'm inclined to think so. Although the problem for the woman in A Pearl Among Rubies (Renee Zellweger -- the first time I ever saw her), the story is easier to comprehend, both because it is in English and because it is far more external and filled with incident than Kadosh. It is also more sensational and somewhat less believable. What makes Kadosh so effective is the silences, which often endure for minutes, leaving the viewer to imagine the thoughts of the characters on screen. The most serious defect of the film for those who don't speak Hebrew is the difficulty, especially on a small screen, of reading the subtitles (often set against a light background). That prevents it from being a 10. I give it a 9.
Review of Kadosh
