Critics reviews

Miss Violence eventually reveals itself as a trenchant anti capitalist screed in which the pursuit of money to insure the preservation of the domestic idyll rages on despite the fact that no-one is actually benefiting from it in any way. It's a somewhat blunt and righteously angry admonishment of the Greek state, but its shocking exploration of economic debasement helps it to retain its momentum right up to a shocking double denouement.

Miss Violence serves as both a political parable and a domestic horror film, because both stories share the same kind of villain: an all-powerful father-figure who tricks his subjects into thinking the grimmest exploitations and manipulations are just part of the daily routine.

Avranas is undeniably an accomplished director, and stylistically there’s a cold beauty to Miss Violence... [but] Miss Violence is, much to its great shame, a cliché-ridden slice of miserablist European exploitation.

What you take from ‘Miss Violence’ depends both on your stomach for this kind of brutality, and whether you appreciate its cold, mannered formalism – one viewer’s stylistic tour de force is another’s grating Haneke pastiche.

Avranas gets plenty of mileage out of the children's fearful faces, creating a twisted reality where every closed door is unpleasantly loaded. In its drip-fed misery and meticulously orchestrated discomfort Miss Violence paints a compelling picture of domestic terror. This is the horrifying, haunting story of the enemy within.

It seems like it’s trying to be clever with regard to subverting audience expectations or in its depiction of a patriarchal figure as somehow emblematic of Greek societal structures in the 1980s. Instead it’s dumb, unsubtle and filled only with some weird fixation on shock value...

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 [Greek] countrymen, but in his turn of the screw, Avranas marshals the abstract qualities of art cinema to comment upon concrete horror.

Alexandros Avranas’s Miss Violence is so gruelling a drama about a family striving to keep its secrets after a daughter’s suicide that audience pleasure doesn’t come into it... However, Avranas’s handling of the slow reveal and the space of the grandparents’ apartment in which they all live is extraordinary.

Stylistically, the film is curious. It relies mainly on a stylisation of acting and movement, using inexpressiveness to create tension in the viewer. But in the face of the more direct moments in the film (as discussed), which are very powerful, the stylisation looks disingenuous and misguided. It's as if Avranas wanted to have his cake and eat it too. At its most stylised moments, the film is almost like a cartoon, and that does a disservice to it.

Imagine a version of Dogtooth without any of its magic, absurdity, or mystery, in which the paterfamilias beats his wife into submission, rapes his children and grandchildren, and pimps them out to pedophiles of all stripes... It's nothing less than frightening that the jury considered this vile, self-righteous, feel-bad art-house exploitation worthy of two important awards.

Avranas’ film employs an irony-free meter that certainly distinguishes his work from that of Lanthimos or Athina Rachel Tsangari, and lends the film’s most explicitly severe sequences of domestic and sexual abuse a kind of cumulative numbing power. Any intended social allegory may be less apparent to audiences than if the proceedings tilted into outright absurdism.

Miss Violence is one of those films you wish you could erase from your mental hard disk after the screening, so disturbing is its tale of an abusive father’s devious sexual, physical and psychological control over the rest of his family. But at the same time, it’s impossible not to acknowledge second-time Greek director Avranas’ directorial bravura in making his own firm, cold grasp of his material and story mirror the iron grip of his pater familias antagonist.