Rachel Weisz (left) and Rachel McAdams in Disobedience (Bleecker Street)

From Sebastián Lelio, director of A Fantastic Woman, this year’s Oscar winner for best foreign-language film, comes this very mature, modern love story set within an Orthodox Jewish community.

It begins with an ailing rabbi (Anton Lesser) giving a sermon on the subject of free will before a synagogue full of young people. He collapses. The film then cuts to a photographer, Ronit (Rachel Weisz), in Manhattan who is interrupted in the middle of a shoot with an important message. She then travels to north London and arrives to the home where the rabbi’s mourning ritual, shiva, is being held.

This Manhattanite photographer is the rabbi’s daughter, who ran away when she was younger and has since been excommunicated from the tradition-bound community in which she grew up. Ronit has come back to try and find some form of resolution. Only she finds out that since she ran away, her father and the community moved on as if he never had a daughter, not even mentioning her in his obituary. However, she still has roots there in the form of two childhood friends, Dovid and Esti. Dovid (Alessandro Nivola) was taken in by the rabbi sometime around Ronit’s fleeing, and is now the rabbi’s presumptive successor. Not long after Ronit’s departure, Esti (Rachel McAdams), her former best friend, married Dovid, to which Ronit reacts in disbelief.

Lelio’s film (from a screenplay he co-wrote with Rebecca Lenkiewicz) is an exercise in delayed gratification. Ronit is only in London for a few days, but we’re there for all of the highlights. When the nature of Ronit and Esti’s relationship finally reveals itself, it comes as such a surprise, even if viewers already know the story.

Both the lead actresses are marvelous. Weisz plays Ronit as a conflicted woman whose whole state of being is one big F-you to Orthodoxy (she’s adamantly single, sexually active, and smokes cigarettes). Then there is McAdams’s Esti, who by appearances seems to have settled down, yet her life has been suspended because she has been compelled to hide who she is. Ronit’s father and the elders of the community have taken old-school measures in the past to curtail her same-sex attraction, including her arranged marriage.

The film’s photography creates a feeling of confinement that uniquely characterizes this close-knit community. Scenes within houses and even out on the street feel cramped; characters often have to walk around each other to get through doorways. This framing wonderfully creates the atmosphere inside this very insular world. How could one even attempt to disobey when there is no privacy? In fact, the first time Ronit and Esti try to rekindle their feelings, they are spotted and someone promptly makes a complaint.

Ronit and Esti are strongly written and performed, but most surprisingly is that the film does not shirk Dovid’s character to the side. He could easily have been written off as the third wheel, the misunderstanding husband, but instead he is as fully formed as the two women in love. Nivola plays him with sweetness and an underlying love for life, his religion, his wife, and Ronit. As the prospective new rabbi, he’s challenged by his wife’s love for another woman and must answer the big question: Does he punish his wife for disobeying, or is disobedience a manifest of free will, essentially God’s gift to us?

Disobedience is steeped in realism, in fact, painstakingly so. It could have gone down the path toward melodrama or even thriller territory. Instead, what is quite shocking is its depiction of people dealing with a life altering predicament as reasonable adults.