"Disenchantment (...) is the main theme of the film. Gitai's characters no longer believe in anything. They are not angry, but they no longer understand anything about their own family history. They refuse their own legacy. They are disenchanted. They hardly live at all, they merely survive. They meet, wait and hope their lives will pick up, that desire will once again foster desire. (...) Devarim is also the film of a generation that no longer respects the dead. And this disrespect, this derision, this nonchalance is also the political expression of disenchantment. It is as if the sons no longer believe in what passes for the essential values of the State of Israel, of its foundation: the respect for the pioneers, the feeling of affiliation with those who believed in the Zionist utopia."
Serge Toubiana, Cahiers du cinéma, n° 523