Miss Violence

Most art movements reach a point when the work slowly begins to break away. That breaking point is reached in Alexander Avranas's Miss Violence, the latest export from the formally ambitious talent factory of contemporary Greek cinema. Recalling this movement's ur-film, Yorgos Lanthimos's Dogtooth, in its depiction of a bracingly bizarre family, Miss Violence honors the thoroughly creepy work of Avranas's countrymen, but in his turn of the screw, Avranas marshals the abstract qualities of art cinema to comment upon concrete horror. From the ominous start, it's clear that something is rotten in Greece. At her family-only birthday party, 11-year-old Angeliki (Chloe Bolota) jumps off the balcony and into the great beyond. The unnamed patriarch (Themis Panou) assures authorities that neither he, his wife (Reni Pittaki), nor their daughter, Eleni (Eleni Roussinou), Angeliki's mother, had reason to suspect depression.

Privately, the children don't acknowledge the tragedy, following the lead of the three adults. Much of the film is powered by one question: What on earth is wrong with this family? Soon, Avranas guides us into proto-Hitchcockian territory, introducing subtle causes for alarm (why does Father force one of the family's children to count the multitudinous trees in a painting? Why does he demand she slap another child?). A new mode, one of horrific confirmations and a devastating presentation of atrocity, enters later. By telling this story, in the lead-up to the revelations, through the observational lens of art cinema (we see his characters but don't necessarily understand them), Avranas ingeniously suggests that this watching-from-a-distance style of filmmaking is a metaphor for the psychological distancing that abuse victims employ when they are forced to cope.