Out in this isolated Israeli nature reserve, a stretch of woodland that is not most people's first stop for a day out, a brother is searching for his sister, and he finds her in a hole in the ground, where she has fallen in. Deeply concerned, he does his best to rescue her, aware that this was specifically created as a trap for a human being and not an animal, and wondering what kind of twisted mind dreams up such an arrangement, but he is just about to get his answer, and it is not one he will like. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest, a quartet of tennis players are driving through when one of their number, Shir (Yael Grobglas) wishes to stop to relieve herself - maybe not the best of ideas.
Rabies was proudly announced (by its duo of writers and directors) as the first ever Israeli horror movie, hailing from a land where perhaps genre movies were not uppermost in the minds, or indeed needs, of the population and their media creators. An outsider might have thought life in that country was tough enough without going to see characters suffering through a tough time as well, but that was denying both the catharsis and escapism of watching a good, solid shocker that would cause you to forget your troubles and lose yourself in the troubles of fictional people who will be having a worse experience of life than you are. The fact this was Israeli was therefore significant.
Certainly directors Aharon Keshales and Navot Papushado went onto some acclaim with their next thriller Big Bad Wolves, but in some ways this no less ambitious effort was a snappier, more satisfying movie. Not to say their follow-up was a lesser work, but the innovation on a small budget - no sets were needed, they simply used the landscape and trees that were available to them - made for a strong degree of novelty, and helping was that they had effectively discovered a new star in Grobglas who would go on to higher profile gigs internationally, leaving this a chance to see where she began. Aside from her, the rest of the cast would likely be unknowns outside of their local homeland.
There was a tone of black comedy about the manner Rabies was arranged, not that it was laugh out loud funny, but the way each scene, expertly edited by the two directors, built to a "punchline", for want of a better word, suggested a humorous tinge to the admittedly brutal proceedings. We were introduced to a bunch of characters at different locations around the reserve, and waited patiently to see when, or if for that matter, they would meet up and whether they would interact, though you got the idea early on that any such interactions would probably not end well for anyone. The tennis players, for instance, drive off and no sooner are they back on the road than they crash into the brother who has been seriously injured and tells them he has to rescue his sister from a psychopathic killer.
The issue there was that just about everyone here had the potential to be one of those, the running theme being that everyone could snap at some point and carry out an act of violence that they may or may not regret, depending on the levels of their conscience. You may have problems with that bleak view of human nature, but this was a horror movie and it was natural that the script would place its denizens in dangerous situations, and that was what you had on offer, with each and every one of them, the main ones at least, having more than a simple brush with death. One sign this was an Israeli chiller was that the forest has landmines hidden in it, not something an American slasher would think to include, but the blood began to flow early on as those who gave into their worst impulses had to be countered by those who had a greater moral sense, all of them on a collision course. It might come across as chaotic at first, but Rabies (in which nobody gets rabies) was smartly assembled and performed with dedication. Music by Haim Frank Ilfman.
