"As interesting as the story is, Orthodox is nothing more than a jumbled, fractured mess and makes it really difficult for audiences to get into it"

Benjamin (Stephen Graham) grew up in an orthodox Jewish family but he never quite fit in. Bullied mercilessly as a kid, he took up boxing as an act of defence and defiance that got him thrown out of the family home by his father. Now a grown man and struggling to keep his family butchers, he has taken to fighting for money, thanks to lifelong friend and wannabe gangster Shannon (Michael Smiley).

What follows is a complex story of corruption, greed and crime that perhaps really should have been more interesting than it turned out to be.

The problem here is that, somewhere between trying to figure out a story that throws a timeline out the window and which characters I wanted to hate less, I failed to enjoy this movie. Benjamin is so painfully naive you just want to reach into the screen and slap him.

The timeline jumps all over the place: forwards and backwards without a care, and in truth it’s a little jarring, especially as significant developments happen in the gaps that we don’t immediately discover. One in particular leaves a huge question mark hanging over the film for far too long, to the point that by the time it explains, it doesn’t really matter anymore.

So many of the characters spend most of their time telling lies that it’s genuinely hard to determine what the truth is and I personally struggled to follow what was going on. I almost feel like the film doesn’t want you to understand it; it’s that incoherent. Just as I was getting into a story thread we suddenly leap through time and that thread concludes in the interlude and we pick up some new line of thought.

As a character piece it works. The actors are all great and the style fits nicely, yet it’s seriously grim and as fascinating as property deals are, they’re a tad cliché for a gangster flick at this point in time and its plot has been handled better elsewhere.

As interesting as the story is, Orthodox is nothing more than a jumbled, fractured mess and makes it really difficult for audiences to get into it.