Whatever else you might say about this high-brow Greek sensation piece, you’d have to admit that it has one of the most arresting opening sequences in recent cinema. We won’t reveal exactly what happens, but, in the aftermath, the film’s apparently respectable family find themselves under investigation by social services.
We are aware from the beginning that some sort ofcorruption runs through the household. The relationship between father and eldest daughter is eerily akin to that between husband and wife. A sense of menace hangs over the apartment. But the precise nature of the perversion is unveiled impressively slowly. There is no great revelation. One grim incident follows another until we find ourselves in the most squalid of corners.
The similarities with Yorgos Lanthimos's great Dogtooth are impossible to ignore. Both films concern a borderline-deranged patriarch and his tyrannical domination of a house full of women. The look is also similar: an icily cool examination of closed doors and clinical hallways. There is a sense of both film-makers viewing the Greek home – indeed, the modern Greek state – as a sort of oppressive, unyielding institution.
Miss Violence is a somewhat less satisfactory piece of work. Whereas Lanthimos imagines an absurd, quasi-comic universe, here director Alexandros Avranas seem unsure as too how deep into surrealism we are venturing. At times the film is horribly real. At others, it plays like a bleak parable. There is, moreover, an immersion in the more sordid incidents that occasionally drifts towards salaciousness.
Still, this remains a deeply unsettling picture that confirms the rude health of Greek cinema. If the artists are to be believed, that country has become one scary place.
