Alexander Avranas’s Miss Violence – which won him the Silver Lion for Best Director at Venice last year – has distinct echoes of Greek New Wave hit Dogtooth (2010).
Similarly to that film, it’s an unsparing vision of a hermetically sealed Greek family which operates according to its own violently dysfunctional orthodoxy; filmed with a cool, lucid realism that renders the subject matter all the more shocking.
Miss Violence is perhaps most interested in drawing parallels with the current Greek economic crisis. Rarely has the maxim ‘the political is the personal’ been more cogently or explicitly delineated than in this searing depiction of a family unit succumbing to the economic and moral malaise that Avranas argues is sweeping his country right now.
In a featureless apartment block in Athens it’s 11-year-old Angeliki’s birthday. It seems a happy event but after the festivities, we watch in horror as she calmly jump offs a balcony and falls to her death.
While the police and social services investigate the reasons for her apparent suicide, her family keep insisting that it was an accident. But they’re also weirdly unperturbed by the tragedy, and seem horribly keen to forget her and move on…
Be warned: as the family’s domestic horrors unfurl this becomes a gruelling watch. But it’s also an impressively cerebral gripping exploration of not simply the weird internal workings of one Greek family, but by extension, the estrangement and corruption of the Greek state as a whole. An audacious, intense anti-capitalist call-to-arms.
