Metacritic-Rezensionen

Stolevski’s handling of the balance between jostling high spirits and the creeping dread of loss is supremely confident; his storytelling is fresh, authentic and genuinely exciting.

Within "Housekeeping’s” restless, naturalistic aesthetic, Stolevski crafts complex and poignant images, contrasting the playacting the couple is forced to do with their searing gazes.

In its cheerfully disordered way, “Housekeeping” tells us that families, like last-minute meals, must sometimes be created from whatever ingredients are at hand.

Stolevski’s lively, garrulous script may be plot-heavy, but the film isn’t propelled as much by grand narrative turns as it is by the powderkeg reactivity of its characters. Each scrap and squabble and occasional flash of understanding between them activates the film anew, so no interpersonal dynamic here ever feels comfortably settled.

Writer and director Goran Stolevski gives us an atypical family portrait that’s brilliantly political without being preachy, loving without being maudlin and epic by being specifically tiny.

Writer-director Goran Stolevski’s Housekeeping for Beginners (Domakinstvo za pocetnici) is a fizzy, huggable portrait of a self-made, roughly blended queer family.

Housekeeping for Beginners will not tell you much about keeping order amidst domestic chaos, per se. It is a primer, however, for turning a house into a home.

The film manages to capture the specific way queer communities communicate with one another and the unique chemistry between them in a way few others have.

In spite of the too-muchness of their performances, the actors wrestle for expressiveness and subtlety against the script’s more obvious and schematic telegraphing of not-quite-nuclear discontent and, ultimately, reconciliation.

Stolevski obviously wants us to sympathize with these wounded characters who have been shunted aside by a cruel society, but that’s hard to do when they are so verbally cannibalistic.