A mother in her mid-forties is frantically putting on make-up in front of a mirror situated on the edge of the frame, nearly escaping the viewer's eye. Her 17-year-old daughter stands paralyzed in the background, contemplating in silent agony the very reflection of whom she is fated to become. The mother is Ruthie (Ronit Elkabetz), who has come to identify prostitution with economic survival and psychological balance. The daughter (Dana Ivgi) is Or, a resourceful teenager who has just completed her first job in an escort services company. Or is clad in a tight dress, and her face is covered with a distorting layer of make-up. Suddenly she has become an embryonic version of her hooker-mom. The same mother she is seeing now, at the peak of the decay of her ill body, masking herself to satisfy the lustful desire of anonymous passers-by, faceless cocks who penetrate her body and leave a stream of blood flowing down her thighs. The blurred Or is the quasi-offscreen Ruthie; they are both thematically tied through the vicious circle of prostitution that the mirror-beyond-the-edge-of-the-frame would reveal...if we saw it.

However, we only glimpse them manoeuvering through the claustrophobic space of their tiny one-bedroom apartment where the camera is planted. The camera doesn´t follow them, it is simply there, waiting for them to cut across the frame-space to point to the inevitability of the downward spiral their economic misery signals. If people like Ruthie and Or are forgettable supporting characters in the action and career-oriented lives for the majority of society, so they remain within the diegetic space of Or. Keren Yedaya´s film is a chronicle of how the two try to crawl out of anonimity to occupy the narrative center stage. Ultimately, Or can only build hope out of the mimetic appropriation of her mother´s prostitution practice. And she seems willing to pay the price once all other doors have been locked against abject bodies like Ruthie´s within the societal prison-house of rejection. Or has learnt that instead of being the instrument for sexual relief of random military boys that gain a blow-job in exchange for nothing, she might as well trade her ass for economic relief at the service of perverse overweight sugar daddies.

Yedaya's world is purely static, not simply because, as she herself has expressed in a rare demonstration of filmmaker humility, she feels she has not learned how to move the camera yet but also because Or captures the unexpected ambiguity of the real letting things unfold before our eyes. The film embraces the unbound honesty of the long take, rejecting altogether the dramatic surplus of the cut or the manipulative pristine perfection of the dolly/tracking shot/steadycam. Spectators are not led anywhere; on the contrary, they must actively search to find, allowing Or's successive static tableaux to crystalize in their appex of emotional intensity through the utter respect for real time action and the diegetic integration of characters and their surrounding space. We are in a world in which close-ups are rarely allowed to breath and non-diegetic music is altogether absent since Yedaya's poetics of reality aims to strip off any stain of artificiality for the sake of thematic and stylistic consistency.

In the end, techno music blasts the speakers downstairs, where a group of mid-twenties repeatedly yell, awaiting their prey-Or and her hooker-mate-to come down. Or sits down, looking around, trying to make sense of a very moment of solitude in which she is internally confronted with whom she has become. However, the certainty that her inner awareness of the destructive character of her condition won´t last assaults our minds. She´s there because there´s nowhere else. Ruthie might indeed be in front of a mirror once again, getting ready to be devoured by a whoever-cock in some barely lit alley, just around the corner of our everyday lives.