The Debt on AllMovie

As her retirement unfurls, ex-Mossad agent Rachel (Gila Almagor) unexpectedly comes face to face with a long-buried demon from her past in Israeli director Assaf Bernstein's haunting psychological thriller The Debt. Though Rachel lived out a central intelligence career packed with one earth-shaking climax after another, the highlight undoubtedly arrived in the mid-'60s, when she and colleagues Ehud and Zvi joined forces to successfully track down and exterminate a long-elusive Nazi war criminal ominously nicknamed "The Surgeon of Birkenau." Now, the mid-'90s have arrived, and Rachel attends the party to celebrate her recently published memoirs. Zvi suddenly crops up for the first time in years, with a haunting and compelling account of an elderly gentleman in a Kiev, Ukraine nursing home, who insists that he is actually the "real" surgeon. Director Bernstein co-mingles 1960s spy film visual style with the tale of a woman in her golden years summoned to perform one last mission, checking off an assignment left unrealized.