Although Viviane and Elisha both periodically speak — mostly to their representation and to the judges, sometimes to each other, quietly slipping between Hebrew and French — much of the talking is done for them. “Gett” is a trial narrative complete with witness testimonies and periodic admonitions from the judge, but with little of the courtroom dramatics that characterize mainstream legal stories. Nothing if not dialectical, “Gett” instead unfolds as a debate about love, marriage and human rights that turns on personal stories and philosophical asides, arguments and counterarguments. As one witness after another testifies about Viviane and Elisha’s marriage, her virtue, his rectitude, it becomes clear that divorce here isn’t a personal choice, but a matter for God and a people.

This makes for gripping cinema from start to finish, almost implausibly so. “Gett” is the third movie featuring Viviane that Ms. Elkabetz has written and directed with her brother Shlomi Elkabetz, after “To Take a Wife” and “Shiva” a.k.a. “Seven Days,” and their work here is assured, streamlined and bold. As if to underscore the highly subjective quality of the storytelling in “Gett” (he said, she said, they said), the Elkabetzes use only point-of-view shots throughout, which tethers every image — of the judges, of Viviane’s legs, of Elisha’s profile — to the perspective of one of the characters. This concentrated focus underscores the personal stakes and torques the tension so that even the image of Viviane letting down her hair — and incurring the wrath of the court — becomes a tremulous action scene.

With her dramatically pale face framed by a voluptuous dark cloud of hair, Ms. Elkabetz is never more effective than when she’s holding still, her face so drained of emotion that it transforms into a screen within the screen on which another, indelibly private movie is playing. This stillness can be transfixing in close-up because the human face remains one of cinema’s great landscapes even if our screens are cluttered with banally framed head-and-shoulder shots. There’s nothing indifferent about the human face here, especially Viviane’s. That’s why every so often the filmmakers fill the screen with her face, allowing you to traverse its planes and trace its lines and, in the process, discover a woman who — even as she has been denied her freedom — retains a stubborn, transcendent humanity.