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Israel · 2019
1h 33m
Director Michal Aviad
Starring Liron Ben-Shlush, Menashe Noy, Oshri Cohen, Sarah Markowitz
Genre Drama
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While her husband struggles to keep his restaurant in business, Orna lands a job as an assistant to a powerful realtor. At her job, Orna faces increasing sexual harrassment from her boss, which soon affects her entire life.
To its credit, Working Woman is laser-focused on its theme. There are no superfluous characters or side-plots. There’s no best friend to confide in, no hilarious sidekick. There’s just a woman who feels all alone like there’s no one she can trust, no one who will understand her.
The New York Times by Ben Kenigsberg
Despite its surface-level placidity, the Israeli feature Working Woman unfolds like a psychological thriller — a procedural that, as it tightens its grip, captures how workplace sexual harassment slowly takes over one woman’s life.
This second narrative feature by Israeli documentarian Michal Aviad is a strong drama that eschews melodramatic contrivance, making its points via cool (yet sometimes squirm-inducing) observation.
The Hollywood Reporter by Elizabeth Kerr
The picture is a slow-burning but ultimately empowering drama that works despite a lack of the bigger, louder, more outwardly emotional moments it could have succumbed to.
Every moment indicates deep compassion for Orna, and anyone else who might be driven to see a multi-layered message movie for the #MeToo era.
Wall Street Journal by Joe Morgenstern
Both performances are strong; Ms. Ben-Shlush is especially appealing in what might have been a clichéd role. If anything, Working Woman goes out of its way to play fair by making Orna insufficiently self-protective. All the same, she’s an innocent on the way to becoming a victim in an understated polemic that becomes an affecting drama.
Los Angeles Times by Kenneth Turan
Working Woman is more than a feature that makes compelling drama out of workplace sexual harassment; it’s an excellent work by any standard, a subtle and insightful character-driven drama that will compel anyone who cares about the interplay of personalities on-screen.
RogerEbert.com by Monica Castillo
The debate around sexual harassment is one many are having around the world, far beyond hashtags and press releases. Working Woman is a part of that global and cultural conversation, yet it never loses that personal focus of one woman’s experience.
Michal Aviad’s film forcefully brings home a reality that many of us have been aware of only intellectually.
Without stooping to the uselessness of style, Working Woman makes its points simply by staying with Orna as she proceeds through stages of shock, humiliation, self-loathing, self-censorship, all emotions her husband finds difficult to understand and which the Bennys of the world rely on.
A middle-aged widow reunites with an old flame, and both grow increasingly haunted by their own past.