Review: ‘Shoshana’ is as convoluted as its geopolitics
2025 / Dir. Michael Winterbottom
☆ 2/5
General rule of thumb: if a movie starts with a minutes-long info dump of history and geopolitics, you’re in for a rough one. Such is the case with Shoshana from director Michael Winterbottom (The Trip, 24 Hour Party People), which begins by trying to get us up to speed on Britain’s early 20th-century colonization of Palestine, the increasing immigration of Jewish settlers, the subsequent Jewish-Arab tensions, and the rise of violent Jewish settler militant groups in about seven minutes.
The rest of the film is about as coherent as its intro. We start in Tel Aviv in 1938 and spend the rest of the film bouncing tonally all over the place between a variety of indistinguishable Zionist terrorist groups bombing markets full of innocent Palestinians, then over to British policemen having tea before torturing said Zionists, and Israeli journalists having drinks by the sea, then onto an awkward sex scene. Is Shoshana a BBC-esque period piece? A gripping spy thriller? A star-crossed Romeo & Juliet story? A condemnation of violent revolution? Who knows? The movie certainly doesn’t.
The lynchpin of this film seems intended to be the taboo romantic relationship between British policeman Tom Wilkin (Douglas Booth) and Shoshana Borochov (Irina Starshenbaum), the daughter of a notable socialist Zionist, that gets increasingly precarious as Tom becomes a target of multiple Zionist factions in the lead-up to World War II. Though these are heavily fictionalized versions of real people, the film gives us no reason these two are together, apart from the fact that they need to be for the narrative. Both performances are quite stiff, and Booth and Starshenbaum have no chemistry together. A stronger pairing may have given this film at least an anchor amidst its convoluted pacing.
While this was filmed and initially released before October 7, 2023, the decision to omit any significant Palestinian character—despite making time for a couple dozen poorly defined Zionist militants—still seems unfathomable, even in that context. Shoshana tries to keep the focus on the tension between the increasingly agitated Jewish groups and the British government over who controls the fate of the territory, as if there wasn’t a whole other group of people there as well. Unfortunately, the Palestinian people’s erasure from this film seems appropriate, as it’s being released in the United States after nearly two years of unimaginable suffering, and Western media are only barely waking up to the widespread famine that continues to be inflicted upon Gaza.
Any viewers who might stumble upon Shoshana hoping to better understand what’s happening in Gaza today, or even the genesis of the current state of Israel, are not going to find any answers here. Ultimately, Shoshana is too overstuffed, overcomplicated, and awkward to provide any answers to a period of time society would benefit from understanding.
Watch if: while you’re visiting your grandparents, your grandmother is watching a BBC period film with Helen Mirren and in the other room your grandpa fell asleep watching Saw, and you walk back and forth for the next two hours and don’t have a good time.