Family interior.

Birthday party: Angeliki turns 11, blows out candles, dances with father/grandfather, takes photo.

She climbs over the balcony and jumps.

Investigation, unanswered questions, unanswered answers....

One quickly senses that there is much wrong.

From iron discipline will come pure, geometric, glacial horror.

Why does the family insist on removing what happened and returning to a "normal" life?"

Through a sadistic game of deprivation and concessions, as one does with lab rats, one manages to keep a hopelessly disfigured family dimension under control.

A manipulation, a heinous plagiarism, unmasks a system between those in power and those who allow themselves to be subjugated.

Who is Miss Violence? Child circumvention, physical abuse, silence? Violence is in the production and acceptance of the irreversibility of a condition, it is in the omertà'. It is in the 'inability to see, in the passivity of action, in the refusal to understand.

Angeliki seems like a revolutionary and acts through the only possibility' she is given: she chooses.

She chooses suicide, a choice that nails in the iron and circular mechanism of the species' functionality, homogenized, unable to get out of the system of the devouring Will that grants only a glimmer of freedom imbued with the Representation of colorless blood; a suicide that is not possibility of being but only of not being, that is not possibility of going out but of staying, that is not saying but keeping silent, that is not liberation but confirmation of reality and its violent power.

A family business, with a CEO as perverse and paranoid as a sadistic and inhuman capitalist master to make any servant-master dynamic shudder of even the most optimistic, conservative and mystical Hegelian.

There is no social inequality in this family business, the women are all commodities of sexual exchange and for that reason a source of money; a natural, immutable and "rational" way of producing profit by considering daughters/granddaughters private property, a postulate at the basis of the productive organization. A real pathological condition of splitting, dependence, self-extraction not relegated only to the conscious realm but considered a real fact of socio-economic nature.

Ultra-alienating this condition at the limits of the most radical capitalist system; there is no provision for some distribution of income except through the filling and emptying of the refrigerator/embodiment of a wage condition closely linked to the sustenance of the body and the most essential necessities.

An exemplary expropriation of consciousness dictated by the force of material and socio-economic violence, " not being consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness."

The subject here is VIOLENCE, without consciousness, without good or evil, a social separation from the social process, in which the individual is a mere reflection of property relations. Not only is the self closely intertwined with the system that endorses it, but it owes its existence to it in the literal sense of the word. The friends-clients, consolidating the pedophile/raping legitimacy of the daddy-daddy, are eager to try new commodity that also becomes exchange through a dance, a funeral ceremony of the apostles of money: the macrabo ritual of human commodity fetishism.

Avranas retraces the themes covered by Lanthimos' Dogthooth, but here one must allow ample time for silence at the end of the film. An experience that forces careful reflection, the danger would be to fall back into the unspoken and unseen harshly denounced in the film.

For' cinema like this is along with our real lives what we choose to see or be or become.

Indelible

23-Jun-2023 by Beatrice