Review by EdgarST

The career of Belgian film director Fien Troch has focused on the dynamics of family, youth and childhood. She has evidenced her interest, since her first short, "Wooww" (1999), a grotesque satire on violence in the domestic and social settings, and how it affects children. That exchange between the child that observes (from an early age to 18 years) and the environment that forks and deteriorates, is a constant in the three films by Troch that I have seen. Her debut feature «Someone Else's Happiness» (2005) is a choral film about one's own and others' pain, set in several homes, around the death of a child run over by a driver who fled; «Kid» (2012) is the story of a country boy who witnesses the deterioration of the farm where he is growing up, when his father disappears and his mother tries to cope with the situation, while her husband is sought by fearsome creditors; and «Home» (2016), with middle-class and working-class main characters, shows a sector of today's youth, made up of children from dysfunctional homes, who reject education, get high, have sex, love their skateboard and rock, and are extensions of their cell phones. The moral fiber is almost non-existent: they are kids who seek to survive, in places where no one has any idea of the crisis they are going through. The film, according to the credits, is based on real events and recounts the case of a boy named Kevin, just out of jail, who tries to regenerate himself as a plumber's apprentice; of John, a boy victim of his incestuous mother; Sammy, the most affluent of the three and the most fragile when he faces situations that his closed home excludes, and finally Lina, disoriented, going from one bed to the other. Fien Troch (who won the Lion of Venice for Best Direction of this film) aptly recurs to melodrama, to adds scenes and moments that gradually increase the tension towards the inevitable tragic event. The end is ambiguous: although it insinuates a possible adjustment of the protagonists' accounts with their inner demons, there is nothing to indicate that they have learned to do so... And beating those demons is not easy, it costs us a lifetime. Another good Fien Troch film, highly recommended.