The Debt

The Debt is a remake of an Israeli movie made a few years before it. This is Americanized though, and therefore cooler. I haven’t done much into the kinda spy based thriller drama movies, so this is a good start. Especially because it isn’t probably known at all, at least not the major actors involved.

The Debt also has two main storylines that take place 30 years apart. So, except for the doctor, the three leads who are Israeli spies are played by two people each. But as I liked the 1960s portion of the movie a bit more, I will just link the younger ones.

Jessica Chastain, Marton Csokas, and Sam Worthington are sent to East Berlin in the mid-60s to capture a Nazi war criminal. This doctor, played by Jesper Christensen, is accused of being the “Surgeon of Birkenau” and doing a lot of bad experiments on patients there. Genetic tests, what ever. So their mission is to capture him, and bring him back to Israel so he can be tried. Noble goal indeed!

Given that this is the past, I assume all trials looked like this.

The girl goes undercover as someone needing advice on giving birth. Eventually they succeed in capturing the doctor, but due to complications, they are unable to safetly carry out part 2 of their plan to get him out of East Germany, and are forced to hold him capture. This begins a psychological like battle between the spies and the doctor, whom cannot be killed because it wouldn’t be fair.

Thirty years after these events, having lied about the events, the secrets that occurred may finally be coming up. They have to try and stop the truth from coming out to save face, and make sure Israel doesn’t look like it has bush league spies.

This plot outline is too vague to give the story justice, but it is defintely a well crafted story. The acting is very good, and hell, its a spy film that doesn’t rely on gadgets or people just being stronger than everyone else. Just seems like normally trained people, trying to make best of a hard situation. I think the ending personally was a bit of a letdown, but what can you do.

Definitely give this movie a shot if you are into that sort of stuff. It has a bunch of German subtitles in it as well, in case you are anti-german.

“Herr Doktor! Ich habe nicht sprochen die Aushwitz und blieberin.”