To the Mossad and Shin Bet agents tasked with finding Eichmann, he was totemic, a stand-in for all the atrocities their friends and families had suffered before and during the war. In one of Operation Finale’s first scenes, the agents gather at a bar in Jerusalem before embarking on their mission, and one of them begins listing the people he lost, demanding others do the same. Before things get too morbid, Peter Malkin (Oscar Isaac) shuts the conversation down, knowing that they can’t view the impending assignment as an act of pure vengeance.

To the still-fledgling state of Israel, Eichmann is a far more valuable prize if he can be put on trial. As Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion (Simon Russell Beale) tells the agents in one of the film’s best scenes, “If you succeed, for the first time in our history we will judge our executioner, and we will warn off any who wish to follow his example.” So Operation Finale becomes not about derring-do, or about the moral toll of assassination (as was the case for Steven Spielberg’s Munich, another movie about a secret Mossad mission). Kidnapping Eichmann boiled down to grabbing him outside of a bus stop and dragging him to a nearby car. The film comes to life right after, as the waiting game begins.

As a director, Weitz has worked in many genres, including teen sex comedy (American Pie, which he co-directed with his brother Paul), fantasy epic (The Golden Compass), and social drama (A Better Life). Operation Finale has the air of something more obviously personal. Weitz’s father, who fled Germany in 1938, served in the Office of Strategic Services during and after the war, and was part of both Operation Valkyrie and the liberation of Dachau. Weitz’s mother, the actress Susan Kohner, starred in Douglas Sirk’s 1959 Imitation of Life, in which she played Sarah Jane, a black woman who passes as white.

Early on in the film, Weitz includes footage from Imitation of Life’s most wrenching scene, in which Sarah Jane’s boyfriend discovers the truth about her and attacks her. In Operation Finale, that movie is playing in a theater in Buenos Aires, where Sylvia Hermann (Haley Lu Richardson) first meets Klaus Eichmann (Joe Alwyn), a handsome, Teutonic boy who she begins to romance. Quickly, she realizes who Klaus’s father is and reports him to Mossad. But Klaus has no idea that Sylvia is a Jew, and even takes her to a secret Nazi meeting; eventually, as he realizes the truth, Weitz echoes a famous shot in Imitation of Life, with Sylvia reflected in a mirror as her boyfriend finally grasps the truth of her identity.

It’s these personal moments that sing the most in Operation Finale, which is constantly grappling with the difference between symbolism and reality. Once captured, the elder Eichmann repeats over and over again that he was powerless to disobey Hitler; still, Weitz doesn’t let the audience forget that the Nazi leader, and his son, are motivated by pure hatred. Eichmann tries to win his captors’ sympathy by presenting himself as a doddering, friendly person, but the film illustrates how his actions turned him into an emblem of the gravest sort of inhumanity.