Innella, The Debt

The Debt is a film that tells the story of three spies: Rachel, David, and Stephan, who are supposed to carry out a mission to kidnap a doctor named Bernhardt who is known to have killed thousands of Jews during the time of the Nazi reign over Europe. The three spies go into Berlin and take the doctor hostage but fail their extraction of him from the country and are forced to take him captive in an apartment in Berlin. As the three spend more time holding him captive, their emotions start to get in the way of their mission.

One night when one of the spies, Rachel, is watching the doctor, he escapes. The three spies then decide to go back to Israel and tell them that while the doctor was escaping, he and Rachel got into a fight and Rachel got knocked down; right before the doctor got away, Rachel shot him dead. The spies then got rid of his body and any evidence of him. This is where their lies begin.

The film is unique in the way that it depicts the characters both when they were the spies on the mission and now as they deal with the implications of their lie. When the spies are older, Rachel and Stephan's daughter writes a book about the story that the public knows about her parents and David. One day, a man in a psychiatric ward says that he is the escaped doctor and agrees to an interview with a journalist. Stephan, scared that the public will find out the truth, arranges a plan with Rachel to finally murder the doctor and get rid of any evidence that says that he actually was the doctor.

This film's ideology is implicit. Throughout the film, there are scenes that show the repercussions of lying and what it can do. In the beginning of the film, David is seen as an older man and he jumps in front of an oncoming bus. He does this because he can no longer deal with the guilt and deceit of the fact that they never did kill the doctor.

Another scene that illustrates the implicit ideology of the film is near the end of the film in which Rachel goes to the psychiatric ward to murder the doctor. When she gets there, she writes a note to the journalist who is on his way to interview the doctor. The note tells the journalist of what actually happened on the mission and she requests that he publishes the truth. Rachel does this in order to clear her conscience and also to justify David. This is how the ideology of the film is implicit.