Miss Violence

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.

11-year-old girl jumps from the balcony and is killed at her birthday. Why? We finally will find out exactly why she did it, but we have to pass through hell first.

Forget all the cheap scary tricks you know from common horror movies. The threat here is real. There are no surprises, no jump scenes, just constant darkness with a family tyrant as its source. Hopelessness for sure, but in an environment which is quite common.

Greece performs a film wonder at the moment. Dark forces meet the surface and there's no need for the supernatural or lots of splatter and gore. There are worse things than that in daily life.

I believe that a movie like this cannot truly be described. Its background, it setting and the colours used in the movie set itself reflect the bleakness and the very real monster that is within this family. After watching I felt some scenes very much left a mark, reminded of the true horror some people experience day to day, no jumpscares and no ghosts. If you like this type of movie, then give it a shot! But I wouldn't recommend to the average person. Praise to the directors for making this a true horror, bleak yet unnervingly astounding.

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.