When Ronit (Rachel Weisz) learns her father, an Orthodox Jewish rabbi, has died she returns home to a hostile environment from the tightknit community. While she’s home her feelings for her childhood best friend Esti (Rachel McAdams) are rekindled, but Esti is now married to Ronit’s cousin Dovid (Alessandro Nivola).

Disobedience is a love story about two women and how their community and and sense of duty has kept them a part for years. From the moment Ronit arrives back in her old neighbourhood, it’s clear that she is seen as an outsider. With her tendency to speak her mind and refusal to conform to the typical path for an Orthodox Jewish woman, she doesn’t fit in with her family or their friends and neighbours.

Esti has followed that more traditional path and while she might be content in her marriage and wifely duties, it doesn’t give her the same feelings she had when she was younger and with Ronit. Weisz and McAdams’s scenes are electric. Ronit and Esti’s silent, lingering glances are just as affecting as when they do kiss or have sex. They are two characters that are lost in different ways; Ronit has been cut adrift from her community for so long, while Esti has almost been smothered by it.

Dovid could quite easily have been the big bad guy, standing in the way of Esti and Ronit’s feelings for one another. He’s Esti’s husband and they do have a seemingly good relationship, but it’s clear that it’s nothing like what her relationship with Ronit could be. Thanks to a thoughtful script and Nivola’s performance, Dovid is a layered character that is kind and caring, and he himself struggles with the outside pressures that are put on him and his relationship by the community he is a part of.

Disobedience is a beautiful film that allows the characters room to breathe, making their relationships and conflicts so much more richer than one might expect going into this film. It’s a film that’s about love and choices and being brave enough to do what’s right for yourself. Disobedience is a film that lingers in your mind long after you’ve seen it. 4/5.