Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is a Mossad intelligence officer who is good at his work; he kills cleanly, quickly and quietly. When his wife commits suicide he denies being emotionally affected by the trauma but is taken off a bigger job and asked to find a Nazi war criminal who is at the gates of death - his orders are to get him before God does. He is sent to be the tourist guide of the war criminal's grandson, Axel (Knut Berger) who is visiting his sister, Pia (Caroline Peters), in Israel. During the two weeks they spend together, Eyal has to confront his attitude towards homosexuality, his unquestioned hate of Arabs and the realities of his profession. Axel and Pia are rich kids who have had to deal with their family's bitter history. Both are intelligent characters and portray the way in which younger Germans can choose to face an unspeakable past.

Underlying this interesting film is the need to confront prejudice, which it does by drawing on the cyclical nature of history and repression, however, the film benefits from the importance of the issues it pivots upon, without always doing them justice. The film is more truthfully a character study of a blinkered man who learns to make decisions for himself. Some of the narrative is a little jumpy, but all in all, Walk on Water is a subtle analysis of responsibility, personal hate and the need to be honest with one's own internalised discrimination.