Walk on Water is a fairy tale of liberal purification—though an exceptionally well-made one. Eyal (Ashkenazi) is a cold-as-steel Mossad agent who eliminates a terrorist in Istanbul and returns home to find that his wife has committed suicide. After this trauma, Eyal winds up with a seemingly soft assignment, gathering information on a notorious Nazi who recently disappeared from Argentina. The Nazi has two grandchildren: one, Pia (Carolina Peters), has moved to Israel and lives on a kibbutz; her brother, Axel (Knut Berger), is a gay Berliner who has come to visit her.
Eyal is assigned to pose as Axel's tour guide. Axel is romantic, empathetic, open to the world—a standing rebuke to Eyal's coiled tension and icy realism. The case ultimately takes Eyal to Berlin, where he winds up face to face with the old Nazi. In this way, the film offers the therapeutic notion that only if Israel deals with its "father" issues (the Holocaust) can it truly come to terms with its "brother" issues (the Palestinians); the idea is relevant but too reductive: It presents the Palestinian conflict as a conjuring of the wounded Jewish soul, rather than as a prickly problem with tangled roots all its own.