Miss Violence

One more great film of the Greek weird wave cinema, wichi Yorgos lanthimos is the most successful director. Slow burn tension, disturbing and shocking. Very well constructed narrative.

My Rating : 7/10

'Miss Violence' maintains a certain tension throughout and because of the incredible acting you do end up believing their miserable life and their family secrets.

It's a disturbing watch and I can only recommend it to moviegoers that like such content - it also has a somewhat of an arthouse feeling to it which I found appealing.

A well known Buddhist proverb goes that 'pain is inevitable, suffering is optional'. By extension violence is inevitable, loss and tragedy are inevitable, but how we let them into our lives makes a world of difference. It matters how a filmmaker reconfigures anxieties into the heightened reality of film, it matters how we as viewers allow our gaze to lucidly inhabit things.

Here's what I mean. In a nutshell the film is about limits to vision. A father keeps his middle-class family under strict and abusive control, almost trapped in their apartment, with exchange for the relative comforts this life provides them. The fridge is always stocked, they can have icecream, and once they finish their homework the reward is a trip to the beach, sometimes postponed.

Ostensibly we have a powerful indictment of this materialist life that in some level is true for most, a life with no spiritual horizons, a boxed safety where mechanical effort is punished or rewarded, and the ripples of violence it sends out.

But if you really look? If you don't just accept this passively wrapped in a box as a lesson on evil? In other words if you adopt the questioning attitude that the father inside the film denies his family and is part of the damage to them, if you begin to question these imposed walls and limits?

The film itself is materialist and constricts our vision. The camera always frames cleanly, the actors are waxen figures on wallpaper, the dialogue is stilted. Animal instincts are even hammered home with footage of apes on TV. All deliberately so but this changes little if it doesn't wake us from our viewing stupor. We have here a world of stifled imagination by stifling ours.

Deeper, the film is content with just the lesson, we never finally at some point enter these lives to know the people behind the masks. We see these people just as Welfare does when they visit, not from within their world but as calculating arbiters. We miss the powerful tension that upsets social workers in these cases, where the abusive parent is still in spite of everything else looked up as a father.

So instead of being called to juggle these states of conflicting truth, we end up after a certain point with an incomprehensible monster and his victims. Of course these monsters exist, which brings us back to how a filmmaker chooses to reconfigure the existence. Saying 'but it happens' doesn't cut it. So do you provoke a damning answer that we can put aside and forget, cleansed for the night that we are not these people, if still mildly unnerved that they are around, or do you evoke a deeper value that will keep me up at night, questioning the limits I inhabit as safe?

This is clean and narrow, there is too much Haneke here and not enough Pasolini or Cassavetes.

Remember Woman Under the Influence? A schizophrenic mother who in the calculating eyes of Welfare would be incompetent to raise children, and yet we see her love and ache, and confused and deathly afraid, and still cutting herself on her broken pieces as she reaches out to love. Marvelous film. But that required patient sculpting in time, an interested eye, ambiguous horizon, wanting to know from the inside.

There is one thing here that I liked. We are not immediately sure just who is who in this family, mother or daughter, father or grandfather. Linked to sex, it creates a powerful tension. We have to search for and define our own limits in this house, then break free of them to examine that self which assumed a narrative: does it change something if the old woman is not the mother? Is the indifference or pain less real?

Too bad. I saw the film at its Greek premiere a few days ago, with the director and cast in attendance. In the ensuing Q&A, no one really questioned the experience of the film for what it presented, at least no one that was comfortable to do so in front of a crowd.

If I were to rename this film I would call it "behind closed doors", although that's perhaps too much on the nose. Closed doors are a visual leitmotif of the film, creating an atmosphere of increasing anxiety throughout. This psychological thriller should come with multiple content warnings, despite most of its triggering elements being implicit rather than explicitly shown on screen.

A seemingly ordinary and very well-adjusted family (the kinship relations of which are -deliberately- confusing in the first part of the film, until we understand who is who to each other) has to deal with a seemingly unexplained tragic loss of one of its younger members. As we spend more time inside the family home, observing the interactions and dynamics, we grow increasingly uneasy. The clues are everywhere from scene one, but, like in real life sometimes, we treat them with a level of disbelief "could it be...? no way... they're just our nice and polite next door neighbours".

At the technical level, everything works: the performances are all just as understated as the aesthetics of the film require and totally in sync with each other, the photography, the pacing, the editing... I can't find a fault.

Like others have pointed out, the influence of the Greek Weirdwave cinema is present, although the "weirdness" is comparatively rather toned down, with the plainly disturbing elements being dialled up to 11. Let's just say it's not a film you watch if you want to feel better about the world.

Miss Violence was the first film I've seen at this years Vancouver International Film Festival and what a fantastic film it is. There are similarities to Giorgos Lanthimos's films (Dogtooth, Alps) where you spend the first third of the film figuring out the relationships of the characters to each other and the rules of the world they live in. The rest of the film is spent either reveling in either horror or fascination in the world and characters created.

This story is given to you in small pieces which build upon your understanding of who these people are. This in turn makes you a very active film-goer and creates a feeling of investment. When Miss Violence reaches it's climax I could feel the collective sighs from the 200+ people gathered to watch it at the festival.

Be warned though...it is heavy, but so worth it. You'll be talking about it for awhile to come.