Michael sublets an apartment from Tomer (Niv Nissim), a younger film student and gay man looking for some extra money.
As Tomer shows Michael around Tel Aviv, the two men's disjoint life experiences, desires and philosophies come into contact with each other.
Michael sees a toddler walk and fall into the water and runs to pick him up, but when he does the boy's mother becomes angry with him.
That night, David apologizes to Michael for going behind his back but expresses excitement at the surrogacy process moving forward.
Michael tells him they should just let the prospect of having a child go before leaving the call to attend a dance performance put on by Daria, a Jewish Israeli and her Palestinian boyfriend.
On the flight home, Michael leaves a voice message for David, suggesting they have dinner at a park that they used to go to when they were younger.
Fox wrote the character of Michael as a proxy for himself, and conceptualized the film as a dialog between his and a younger generation of gay, Jewish, Israeli men.
"[2] From the early days of writing, Fox envisioned John Benjamin Hickey as the ideal actor to play Michael, who was ultimately cast for the role.
[1] The story of the tragedy in Michael's past was based on the experience of a close friend of Fox's, a gay couple in Israel whose surrogate child died during birth.
[4] Sublet features cinematography by Daniel Miller, who had previously won the Israeli Academy Award for Best Cinematography for his work on the 2018 film Fig Tree, and was edited by Nili Feller, who won the same for Best Editing for her work on Waltz with Bashir (2008) and went on to win again for Savoy (2022).
The site's critical consensus reads, "Thoughtful and well-acted, Sublet tenderly depicts a romance that reaches across the generation gap – and into the viewer's heart.
[14] Armond White of National Review praised director's "Platonic and political sophistication",[15] while Jay Weissberg of Variety said that the characters' lack of significant evolution across the plot impeded the narrative and made the film feel "risk-free and standardized".
[16] Beatrice Loayza of The New York Times wrote that the film presented a charming and enjoyable double character study but failed to subvert the cliché encounter around which it is based.
In The Gay and Lesbian Review, Richard Schneider draw parallels from the slow development of Michael and Tomer's relationship to that of the titular characters in one of Fox's earlier films, Yossi & Jagger (2002).