Oxygono

A mother who has a sexual relationship with her son-in-law, a family divided over land, and a son's rebellion and homosexual relationship with an older gentleman. The film explores the underbelly of a traditional Greek family after a tragic car accident where a daughter is killed. I thoroughly enjoyed the twists and turns of this film. The story moves fast, but once you get a hold of who's betraying whom, you become enthralled by the lives of this wonderfully despicable family. The son, Christos, plays the central character. The actor plays him marvelously; full of teenage angst, confusion, and only wants to detach himself from the family drama that surrounds him. The many characters in the film each with their own set of drama plays out well with a very uncompromising ending that leaves you wanting more. Go see this film if you want to see family dysfunction at its best. It's a great contemporary Greek tragedy.

Thanasis Papathanasiou and Michalis Reppas serve the double capacities as writers and directors of this Greek film that places a contemporary Greek family on the stage of ancient Greek tragedies, even to the point of parallels between the characters and Greek tragedy roles! Though the story is complex and meanders a bit too much to follow with ease, it does make a powerful statement about families torn apart by death, greed, and all manner of sexual disloyalties.

The family consists of mother Magda who owns important land coveted by entrepreneurs and who runs a bakery while caring for her wholly invalid husband injured in a car crash that killed her daughter; a money-conscious daughter married to Stelios, an earthy stud of a man with whom Magda is having an affair; the silent near comatose father who sits observing the tragedy like a wordless Greek chorus; and Christos, the hunky son who is bisexual and sleeping with a young girlfriend and an older woman and an older bisexual male city official Yiorgos who is married with children and is in charge of the city planning, his chief project involves the land Magda owns.

The plot is convoluted but basically boils down to the development of a blackmail plan that will gain money for the land the family owns. The blackmail plan involves Christos' affair with Yiorgos in which videotapes are made of Christos' assignations with Yiorgos. The lives of all the characters are altered once the greed consumes them and there are discoveries, a death, betrayals, twists and feuds that end in a surprising manner.

The cast is strong, especially Yannis Tsimitselis as Christos, Nena Menti as Magda, Akilas Karazisis as Yiorgos, and Alexis Georgoulis as Stelios, with all of the supporting roles well cast. There may be just too many factors to keep straight in this film, but the overall effect is rather grand in its unremitting examination of a family in the process of disintegrating. Well done though taxing movie. Grady Harp

A convoluted story so sophomoric in its presentation as to suggest it was written by a committee of 13-year olds not yet familiar with the film's (sparse) subject matter. This is a movie of less sophistication than the most banal soaps of daytime TV, intended for an audience that cannot hold a thought longer than 30 seconds and who have little experience of the world outside of TV. The viewer feels some sympathy for the actors, playing a script in which every utterance rings false and every motivation has not been thought through. The only message that comes through clearly in this piece is "we're all fatuous idiots without any kind of a clue". Working to help produce such a bad movie cannot have been satisfying from any of the involved actors' career perspectives. The sex scenes can have only been added in the misguided hope of spicing up a woefully lost film. These scenes have no real bearing on such a skeleton storyline and, with such dumpy- looking participants engaged in coy, passionless grapplings, they are far from titillating. The punch-ups and scuffles are equally unmoving and leave the viewer mystified, wondering why they even happened. After 2 hours of pointless dreck masquerading as emotionally-fraught DRAMA, this tale could have ended in any number of ways, any of which wouldn't have made any difference to what this movie amounted to: cinematic barf. Only thing to do is flush it. Twice.

Well as a Greek civilian i saw in that movie the real Greek culture ... Sex , violence , blackmail is everything what a modern audience can ask from a movie!!!When i saw that black comedy i thought of Pedro Almodovar . To tell the truth , Reppas and Papathanasiou never reached Almodovar's abilities but i think they made a good start . The plot of Blackmail Boy ( a.k.a. Oxygono (GR) ) was amazing , it was quite good directed and the actors played also good in the film especially Yannis Tsimitselis and the 'Greek God' Alexandros Georgoulis. I got surprised when i saw the criticism of the film and the only thing i have to say is : Everyone who prefers European cinema MUST SEE THAT MOVIE. Thank you fellas

This movie is one of the worst movies I've ever seen (And I'm not a difficult viewer). About half or more of the movie was filled with unnecessary scenes of sex, violence, mind sickness, that were not telling anything to the viewer, except the will of the director/writer to make something that socks.

There are better ways to sock and say something at the same time... Maybe I didn't get the point but as an example the sexual relationship between the mother and her daughters husband didn't make any sense to the whole movie (I wonder what it could be different if it didn't exist). Also the continuous (over than 10 scenes) forcing of the young boy to his lover to make love, was most of the times unnesessary. My final filling was that I saw a movie that could be based to a 1,000 words story.