Lior Ashkenazi in Foxtrot (Giora Bejach/Sony Pictures Classics)

Foxtrot brings the satirical tradition of Catch-22 to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), a conscription army that is always on wartime alert; the country is surrounded by potential terrorists and enemies who have never made peace. But universal military service also means everyone has been cynically exposed to the possibility of cover-ups and SNAFUs (a World War II term) in order to make the generals and politicians look good.

Writer/director Samuel Maoz, whose lacerating Lebanon (2009) criticized the IDF’s direction in a war, opens with a domestic scene every family dreads and army bureaucracy has a team to handle. In a spacious, modern apartment, father Michael Feldmann (the always expressive Lior Ashkenazi) and mother Dafna (Sarah Adler) are officially informed that their son, Jonathan, has died while in military service. Medics are efficiently ready with a tranquilizer for the distraught mom, and a young religion officer (Itamar Rotschild) advises the very secular dad on the procedures to follow—wording for the military funeral announcement is provided to the family.

While the mother is predictably hysterical, the father is suspicious: he stubbornly insists on seeing the body of his son. That is not standard procedure, and the request gums up the bureaucratic machine. Michael grieves in his son’s room, full of the detritus of teenage musical, video, and movie interests, and confesses to his brother how complicit and guilty he feels for casually dropping his son off at the bus stop without even expressing his love. While he’s still trying to reach his daughter, and his sister-in-law becomes agitated at the news just as his wife awakes, the army admits to an administrative error, and the father’s full fury is unleashed.

The second, and somewhat surreal, act is the heart of the film, and resonates with very amusing irony that alternates with tension. Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray) is on night-time guard duty in the north, far from a cell phone tower, near the Syrian border with the Golan Heights. An isolated area fraught with potential for infiltration or terrorist attack, it has stayed relatively peaceful, even during the Syrian civil war. Stuck at a desolate checkpoint, Jonathan and his three comrades are barracked in what looks like a freight container, eating canned ready-to-eat meals, and trying to relieve the boredom of passing hours, with silly games and even a dance routine. (Yes, the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet still uses “Foxtrot” for the English letter “F,” even though millennials may not know that’s a dance.)

Their unit reliably fulfills their guard duty, with each soldier in his proper place and fulfilling his individual responsibilities: one shines a spotlight on the occasional approaching vehicle; one questions the annoyed passengers; another, perpetually wearing headphones, checks ID’s in an antiquated computer; and Jonathan keeps his rifle squarely aimed, just like in his violent video games at home. But there are judgment calls the young men have to make when inspecting cars. As long as they follow correct procedures (like the soldiers who brought the bad news in the beginning), they will be officially absolved, if necessary, not that they aren’t haunted by their actions if they commit errors. Worse, Jonathan’s father’s complaint sets in motion a terrible intersection of the domestic and military fronts that challenges notions of safety and fate.

Some of the irony may be lost on a foreign audience, such as a symbolic shot Maoz describes in the press notes that he carefully set-up to include a funeral notice alongside a bowl of oranges, the “golden apples” of Zionism and here representative of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Even more than Talya Lavie’s Zero Motivation (2014), about women in the Israeli army, audiences will appreciate this more caustic theater of the absurd.

Though Foxtrot was Israel’s submission for the 2018 Oscars, the Israeli culture minister denounced its portrayal of the military, perhaps indicating that the government is not used to the cynicism and criticism Britain and the United States faced in such comedies as Richard Lester’s How I Won The War (1967) or Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H. (1970).