Sometimes it occurs to me I should be concerned at some of the films that Amazon recommends to me on the basis of my known preferences and this one probably beats them all. It is a very, very good film but I wouldn't truly recommend it to anyone. At least not someone I didn't know very well and could be sure that they could deal with the worryingly believable and atrocious basis of this film. It begins innocuously enough with a daughter's eleventh birthday. And yet wasn't I slightly perturbed at the flat and colourless surroundings, the spooky lack or gaiety, the fact they were dancing to a Leonard Cohen track? And the way the 'father' held his daughter? Almost immediately there is a most dramatic incident and then we are taken back to a measured family routine where everything is under control and we get drawn further into this only seeming innocuous family. There are truly dreadful events represented here and although most of this gradually dawns upon the viewer during the course of the film there are a couple of openly distressing scenes. There is no attempt to set this awful business in the past and we can only guess at how surprising this depiction is to a Greek audience, if indeed it had a theatrical release. People and glass houses and all that so I will say no more other than that maybe we in the UK need such a brave film maker to look further into some of our more murky corners that are, similarly, maybe not too far from home.

The purpose of this film was to shock just for the sake of it. This is not independent cinema, this is pure sickness. We need to move away from the sick minded people and the movies that reproduce sickness so they can be named ''independent'', ''shocking'' , ''contemporary'' etc. Every useless director in Greece is trying to imitate previous successes (dogtooth) and make a name, but apparently they cannot realize the limits. Or are they sick too? The worst part of the movie was the attempted connection of these disgusting actions with the financial crisis (the low wage that that the grandpa was offered). Don't watch it.

Alexander Avranas's Miss Violence has a realistic point of view that could define various understanding of violence. Does the society make you violent? Or is violence just an essential part of the human nature?The film is about a family struggle. Clearly, they have many economic issues. The opening scene is remarkable. It's an event that the story builds up from. The opening sequence shows a birthday family party for an 11-years-old girl. It shows a happy family until the record player starts playing a happy song by Leonard Cohen called "Dance Me to the End of Love". With the peaceful sound of the music, the birthday girl commits suicide. She jumps from the balcony. Since then the story gets dark and darker. The main character of the story is the father/grandfather who represents masculinity. Thus He is in a total control of the family. The first half of the film shows him as responsible father dealing with a great tragedy, the death of his granddaughter who we don't know who her father was. A complete disaster happened as we find out that he is sexually abusing his other granddaughter as well as selling her out for strangers as prostitute. The film explores different kinds of soft and extreme violence as hitting kids in the face, beating, yelling, screaming, raping, killing, and little blood. The violence doesn't come out as an enjoyment like many of the killing in Hollywood movies instead it's just an acceptable family behavior.Finally, as the grandmother puts an end for the husband extreme abuse. We don't really know if she killed him or did she cut off his…. Therefore, this movie would be better if we became aware of what happened at the end. When you close a movie like that you will have defiantly different reactions. Mine was like I really wanted to see what happened to him. I wanted to see every members of the family dancing around his dead body as a sign of the end of a muscular ignorant **shole control….I give it 7 out of 10. It's worth watching with much respect for Greece cinema specially the great long-live director Theo Angelopoulos

A well known Buddhist proverb goes that 'pain is inevitable, suffering is optional'. By extension violence is inevitable, loss and tragedy are inevitable, but how we let them into our lives makes a world of difference. It matters how a filmmaker reconfigures anxieties into the heightened reality of film, it matters how we as viewers allow our gaze to lucidly inhabit things.Here's what I mean. In a nutshell the film is about limits to vision. A father keeps his middle-class family under strict and abusive control, almost trapped in their apartment, with exchange for the relative comforts this life provides them. The fridge is always stocked, they can have icecream, and once they finish their homework the reward is a trip to the beach, sometimes postponed.Ostensibly we have a powerful indictment of this materialist life that in some level is true for most, a life with no spiritual horizons, a boxed safety where mechanical effort is punished or rewarded, and the ripples of violence it sends out.But if you really look? If you don't just accept this passively wrapped in a box as a lesson on evil? In other words if you adopt the questioning attitude that the father inside the film denies his family and is part of the damage to them, if you begin to question these imposed walls and limits?The film itself is materialist and constricts our vision. The camera always frames cleanly, the actors are waxen figures on wallpaper, the dialogue is stilted. Animal instincts are even hammered home with footage of apes on TV. All deliberately so but this changes little if it doesn't wake us from our viewing stupor. We have here a world of stifled imagination by stifling ours.Deeper, the film is content with just the lesson, we never finally at some point enter these lives to know the people behind the masks. We see these people just as Welfare does when they visit, not from within their world but as calculating arbiters. We miss the powerful tension that upsets social workers in these cases, where the abusive parent is still in spite of everything else looked up as a father. So instead of being called to juggle these states of conflicting truth, we end up after a certain point with an incomprehensible monster and his victims. Of course these monsters exist, which brings us back to how a filmmaker chooses to reconfigure the existence. Saying 'but it happens' doesn't cut it. So do you provoke a damning answer that we can put aside and forget, cleansed for the night that we are not these people, if still mildly unnerved that they are around, or do you evoke a deeper value that will keep me up at night, questioning the limits I inhabit as safe?This is clean and narrow, there is too much Haneke here and not enough Pasolini or Cassavetes.Remember Woman Under the Influence? A schizophrenic mother who in the calculating eyes of Welfare would be incompetent to raise children, and yet we see her love and ache, and confused and deathly afraid, and still cutting herself on her broken pieces as she reaches out to love. Marvelous film. But that required patient sculpting in time, an interested eye, ambiguous horizon, wanting to know from the inside.There is one thing here that I liked. We are not immediately sure just who is who in this family, mother or daughter, father or grandfather. Linked to sex, it creates a powerful tension. We have to search for and define our own limits in this house, then break free of them to examine that self which assumed a narrative: does it change something if the old woman is not the mother? Is the indifference or pain less real?Too bad. I saw the film at its Greek premiere a few days ago, with the director and cast in attendance. In the ensuing Q&A, no one really questioned the experience of the film for what it presented, at least no one that was comfortable to do so in front of a crowd.