In her debut movie, Fill the Void (2012), the Israeli writer-director Rama Burshtein showed a connoisseur’s eye for the way women and men respond to the universal and overwhelming pressure to get married. She returns to that theme in this gentler and more indulgent comedy, which takes a little time to grow on you. It looks like a rather traditional romcom, and concludes in that vein, but via unexpected detours and red herrings and a very tense, strange wedding scene.

Mischal (Noa Kooler) is a single woman who quirkily runs a petting zoo. She is desperate to get married. So lonely and desperate, in fact, after a string of awful dates and a failed engagement, that she eventually books a wedding hall for a certain date and invites guests, trusting to a kind of magical thinking, or that this booking will be like Kevin Costner’s baseball diamond: if she sets it up, the groom will somehow come. Perhaps she intends to shame or embarrass her male circle of friends into submission, or just defy fate. The real-time agony of the wedding day itself has an edge-of-the-seat factor, and Kooler gives a sensitive, emotionally generous performance.