Wedding Doll | Telescope Film
Wedding Doll

Wedding Doll (Hatuna MeNiyar)

Critic Rating

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User Rating

Fixated on romantic fantasies, a kindly and strong-willed young woman with a mild mental disability embarks on a relationship with her boss’s son at the factory where she works— much to the concern of her protective mother. A beautiful and melancholy little film that finds moments of happiness and hope in everyday life.

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What are critics saying?

80

The Hollywood Reporter by Sheri Linden

In his first narrative feature, documentarian Nitzan Gilady demonstrates an assured grasp of visual storytelling, using a stunningly rugged desert setting that’s as much a character as the film’s perpetually sunny, intellectually challenged 24-year-old and her world-weary mother.

80

CineVue by Ben Nicholson

Wedding Doll may be a small film, but it's deftly executed and built on two remarkable leading performances.

75

IndieWire by David Ehrlich

The bittersweet and gently moving Wedding Doll sidesteps so many of the traps it sets for itself because writer-director Nitzan Gilady is less interested in the purity of his heroine than he is in what it reveals from within the people around her.

70

Screen Daily by Allan Hunter

It is a sad little tale but one that manages to find notes of hope amongst the setbacks and rejections of everyday life.

70

Los Angeles Times by Katie Walsh

Wedding Doll is a small film with a unique take on coming of age and finding one's own place in a world that's often unwelcoming to people who are different.

70

Village Voice by Michael Nordine

Gilady never treats her heroine as a prop in someone else's redemption arc, and Rosenblatt's performance will have you looking for her work in other films.

70

Variety by Dennis Harvey

Though the darker tonal shift toward the end is a bit jarring, director/scenarist Gilady demonstrates a deft, confident hand with the storytelling, cast and general packaging, and makes assertive use of the dramatic desert setting.

70

Screen International by Allan Hunter

It is a sad little tale but one that manages to find notes of hope amongst the setbacks and rejections of everyday life.

63

RogerEbert.com by Glenn Kenny

I suppose the fact that I was affected as I was by Wedding Doll is testimony to its emotional effectiveness. But while Hagit is able to crack a smile at the movie’s end, I feel a pall wrapping around me every time I contemplate her predicament, or the predicament of her real-life models.

60

The New York Times by Andy Webster

Mr. Gilady, a documentarian making his fiction feature debut as a writer and director, over-stacks the deck with this belabored if artfully shot story.

58

The A.V. Club by Benjamin Mercer

In spite of all Wedding Doll’s strengths, its scenario comes to seem a little unseemly: Giladi establishes Hagit’s hopes and dreams mostly just to show the terrible ways that they’re dashed.

50

The Film Stage by Michael Snydel

There’s a potentially good story to be mined here, probably most likely with the mother, but every time it starts to find fertile emotional ground, it can’t help but become distracted and search for another surface.