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Confrontational, both in form and content, Greek writer/director Alexandros Avranas’ chillingly controlled family drama begins with a young girl’s suicide, before unravelling the horrors that forced her hand. At the centre of this sinister web sits ‘Father’ (Themis Panou), a softly spoken disciplinarian who makes his ‘children’ complicit in their own abuse.
Presumably these patriarchal evils are meant to have allegorical echoes in the world outside, but the film, like its characters, barely leaves the flat, its troubling tension deriving – as in Markus Schleinzer’s 2011 Michael – from the certainty that the sublimated violence will engulf everything .
Matt Glasby is a freelance film and TV journalist. You can find his work on Total Film - in print and online - as well as at publications like the Radio Times, Channel 4, DVD REview, Flicks, GQ, Hotdog, Little White Lies, and SFX, among others. He is also the author of several novels, including The Book of Horror: The Anatomy of Fear in Film and Britpop Cinema: From Trainspotting To This Is England.