What does a thirteen-year-old Libyan boy, a Polish Auschwitz survivor and a Moroccan guard have in common? Each person is an otherwise forgettable Jewish Israeli citizen and plays a pivotal role in the execution of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Nazis’ Final Solution which led to the Holocaust during World War II in the European theater. “June Zero” (2022) starts in Israel in 1961, takes a brief pitstop to Poland without setting foot in Auschwitz then culminates when the boy is now an older man fighting to claim his place in history. American director and cowriter Jake Paltrow, Gwyneth’s little brother and the son of actor Blythe Danner and Bruce Paltrow, a television producer of “St. Elsewhere” who descended from Eastern European immigrants, pairs with Israeli filmmaker and cowriter Tom Shoval to tell a story about how immigrants begin to forge their identity and find ephemeral common ground in destroying a human whose reputation has the weight of a demon. It is Paltrow’s first film shot outside of the US, and the actors speak Hebrew, Spanish, Polish and English, which is a rare, daring creative choice for an American director.

There are plenty of films about capturing Eichmann (“Operation Finale,” “The House on Garibaldi Street”), watching and reporting on the trial (“Hannah Arendt”) or prosecuting him (“The People Vs. Fritz Bauer”), but not a lot about what to do once you catch the devil. Paltrow deserves credit for coming up with an original idea: using Eichmann as an entry point to focus on ordinary people in extraordinary times, hash out the intersectional identities of each character and unofficially layout the inherent complications of a national unity founded on trauma. “June Zero” is divided into four chapters and a postscript. Each chapter has its own protagonist whose stories overlap until the last chapter captures the events immediately following Eichmann’s execution, namely the disposal of his body, and involves elements from each story.

The first protagonist is David Saada (Noam Ovadia), a thirteen-year-old who immigrated to Israel with his father and little brother and is always out of step with those around him. He faces bias at school for looking Arabic, and his teacher mistakes his youthful mischievousness, which includes completing a class assignment, as a lack of empathy for European Jews focused on the trial after reeling from the Holocaust. A little well-placed dialogue in the form of an outburst offers a necessary prose dump regarding the suffering that Arab Jews also faced at the hands of the Nazis. To squelch his budding juvenile delinquency, his father gets a job for David at an oven factory that Shlomi Zebco (Tzahi Grad) owns. In the world of “June Zero,” Zebco is a renowned Zionist whom Israeli government officials admire but also deem a terrorist and animal because of his ruthless willingness to kill the British and Arabs before Israel became an internationally recognized state.

When David works at Zebco’s factory, he is understandably uneasy at the prospect of an older man who seems agreeable but turns on a dime, especially because David’s appearance so David finds himself loudly proclaiming his citizenship as an Israeli. In one scene, Zebco gets a fleeing David to come to him only to slam him on the ground. When the other factory workers assign David to clean the inside of an oven, David enjoys the challenge and purpose of the work, but moviegoers will gasp at the intentional horror of a Jewish kid climbing into an oven. Later the macabre nature of their work takes on an almost mythical, historical ghoulish significance as it is supposed to remind everyone of the ovens used in the Holocaust, which Paltrow and Shoval spell out for any viewer who may miss the reference. David finally fits into his newly adopted home, but it feels as if any second, the sense of purpose could transform into an epiphany on the level of “The Bridge on the River Kwai” (1957). On one hand, there is power in reclaiming the tools of mass murder, but is it justice or dangerous to use ovens in a similar fashion as the worst culprits in twentieth century history? The filmmakers leave this note ambiguous, but it is heavily implied that Zebco understands his madness so while he is willing to let David become a part of history, he attempts to stop it from engulfing and defining David entirely as the Holocaust did for Zebco and the men in his factory. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote in “Beyond Good and Evil,” “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” Zebco did not achieve his goal of entirely shielding David as Paltrow and Shoval revisit David after he reaches Zebco’s age. He has transformed from a boy who approves of revenge short of destroying human life to someone who has taken it as a part of his military service, which is never morally interrogated. The unspoken question is how much of the young David is still that person who understands evil and refuses to perpetuate it because it touched him and his family. It is not evil to survive or defend oneself, but there is a price for David refusing to be the target of bullies of any age. Paltrow shoots these sections as if he is paying homage to Italian realism or French New Wave, and it is old-fashioned like a warm, inviting homage.

The second protagonist is a Moroccan guard, Haim Gouri (Yoav Levi), who must remain vigilant against the press and European Jews to ensure that Eichmann lives long enough to be lawfully executed. This section is the most surreal and expressionistic. It has the sardonic tone of a bureaucratic comedy of errors because it begins with a car accident then subsequently depicts the logistics of how to ensure that a monster gets a haircut without his throat getting slashed. Other than Haim’s national origin, he remains a mystery, and only his professionalism defines him, but there is plenty of subjective insight into the counterintuitive, conflicting psychological strain of distrusting your fellow citizens, especially European Jews, while protecting an ordinary man who happens to be a Nazi. Is Haim just finally buckling under the toll of being in the spotlight and spending time with a rational madman or did the car accident affect him?

Haim as an unreliable narrator does begin to slow the momentum of the narrative and watching him unravel becomes a bit single-minded, especially as he orbits Eichmann, who remains partially obscured on the edges and would have been better remaining entirely off screen. It is not often that a filmmaker like Paltrow doubts the rationality of a group that he belongs to in favor of a person of African descent, but in the end, no human being can emerge unscathed from the contradiction of protecting a human being to execute him because he is a monster even if that guard had less exposure to  the impact of Eichmann’s wickedness. The ambiguity and inability to define objective truth and reality dominates this story. Because he is not like the majority, Haim becomes the ultimate Israeli entrusted with the duty of protecting an enemy for the grand finale, but the cost is paranoia and fracturing from reality.

The third protagonist, Micha Aaronson (Tom Hagi), is the kind of character that is expected in a movie about Israelis. As part of a Polish tour, he recounts his story of surviving Auschwitz as a former local, and a young woman, a fellow Israeli official, Ada (Joy Rieger), the only living woman who appears on screen at that point, warns him that he is a test for people who want to create tourism around trauma, a subject meditated upon in “Treasure” (2024). Aronson finds this prospect soothing as someone whose testimony was once doubted during the Israeli immigration process. An intellectual, philosophical theoretical debate is disguised as dialogue. The actors behave as if this tete a tete is the beginning of a romance, but it is just a ruse to get viewers to contemplate the nature of foundational identity rooted in trauma. Ava argues, “They’re not sanctifying the memory, they’re commemorating the crime.” Paltrow keeps circling around this theme of the Nazi problem. In seeking justice, does some humanity get sacrificed, and is it worth it? For Micha, it is, but for Ava, it kills life and the potential to live freely. This section is straightforward and conventional visually.

While Paltrow and Shoval are admirable for tackling some provocative and controversial questions, “June Zero” begins to drag when it is not focused on its youngest protagonist. Not every movie can be “My Dinner with Andre” (1981). Paltrow is great at concepts and starts strong, but often has issues with being consistent in the execution just as he did in his fictional feature “Young Ones” (2014), a problem that he did not have when he collaborated with his friend, director Noah Baumbach, i.e. Mr. Greta Gerwig. and interviewing another friend, director Brian De Palma, for the documentary “De Palma” (2015). He deserves credit for never getting in a rut, but a movie must be somewhat absorbing so a viewer can forget about anything else, not just intellectually intriguing.

“June Zero” is filled with archetypes except for David. It is hard to imagine these characters’ lives when they are not working, which may be the point. If Paltrow and Shoval are suggesting that the price of justice or vengeance is sacrificing a full life and some humanistic feeling, they probably are not wrong, but it does not make a movie memorable or dynamic. Paltrow and Shoval’s film posits that Israel’s immigrant melting pot was forged in the crematorium that incinerated Eichmann’s body, but it also made them harder, less individualistic and humanistic. There is nothing sadder than believing a life only has value if a person does something of historic significance. Nazis euthanized people for not having value. Nazis must be stopped in the world and the hearts and minds of everyone with a mindset that prioritizes work over the innate worth of someone made in God’s image absent their accomplishments.