Miss Violence (2013)

Film's that investigate the underbelly of society are not unusual, however ones that leave an indelible mark upon the viewer are. Miss Violence is one of those films. It's not an easy watch, and it does use cinematic devices that were pioneered by other directors, but this is a truly challenging film that immerses the viewer in a world that we can't help but be both intrigued and repelled by.

Miss Violence distances itself from more run-of-the-mill offerings in this genre, delivering an all too believable world with strong acting performances, ominous silences, and skillful use of the more mundane aspects of domestic life that combine to leave the viewer wanting to know what happens after the titles roll.

Fmovies: Sometimes it occurs to me I should be concerned at some of the films that Amazon recommends to me on the basis of my known preferences and this one probably beats them all. It is a very, very good film but I wouldn't truly recommend it to anyone. At least not someone I didn't know very well and could be sure that they could deal with the worryingly believable and atrocious basis of this film. It begins innocuously enough with a daughter's eleventh birthday. And yet wasn't I slightly perturbed at the flat and colourless surroundings, the spooky lack or gaiety, the fact they were dancing to a Leonard Cohen track? And the way the 'father' held his daughter? Almost immediately there is a most dramatic incident and then we are taken back to a measured family routine where everything is under control and we get drawn further into this only seeming innocuous family. There are truly dreadful events represented here and although most of this gradually dawns upon the viewer during the course of the film there are a couple of openly distressing scenes. There is no attempt to set this awful business in the past and we can only guess at how surprising this depiction is to a Greek audience, if indeed it had a theatrical release. People and glass houses and all that so I will say no more other than that maybe we in the UK need such a brave film maker to look further into some of our more murky corners that are, similarly, maybe not too far from home.

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.

Miss Violence fmovies. 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 assum

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.

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.