A dysfunctional family struggle to hide their inner tensions behind a facade of bourgeois luxury in the latest film from Slovenian writer-director Sonja Prosenc, whose previous two features were both selected as her home nation’s official Oscar submissions. A tragicomic farce clothed in delicious visuals, Family Therapy is admirably ambitious, frequently hilarious and superbly acted, with a darkly absurd tone that owes something to Yorgos Lanthimos and his Greek Weird Wave cohorts, but also to a broader cinematic tradition of acerbic class-war satires set in grand family homes, from Pasolini’s Teorema (1968) to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite (2019) and beyond.
Family Therapy is impressive and imaginative, but not flawless, with a sprawling two-hours runtime that meanders in places, plus a final act that lacks focus or conviction. Even so, this is an unusually bold, witty, high-gloss production for such a small nation with a modest cinematic footprint. World premiered at Tribeca in June, Prosenc’s third feature makes its European debut in competition at Sarajevo Film Festival this week. With its universal themes, caustic humour and classy production values, it could even have crossover potential as Slovenia’s answer to Saltburn (2023).
Prosenc opens with a slow-motion shot of a car bursting into flames, an attention-grabbing image set to a lively chamber-orchestra score. Meanwhile, at the airport, pompous aspiring writer Aleksander (a clownish, compellingly weasly Marko Mandic) is awkwardly trying to introduce his art-gallery manager wife Olivia (Katarina Stegnar) and sullen teenage daughter Agata (Mila Bezjak) to his other child, Julien (Aliocha Schneider), the twentysomething son from a previous relationship who he is meeting for the first time. As this well-heeled quartet drive home, they spot another family stranded by their burned-out car, but they suppress any Good Samaritan urges and just keep going.
Most of the action takes place in and around the wealthy family’s gorgeous country villa, a glass-walled modernist fortress nestled in an idyllic woodland landscape. Aleksander and Olivia are initially wary around Julien, who does not share their privileged background and highbrow pretensions. Indeed, the new arrival strikes a wrong note early in his visit when he welcomes the stranded family from the roadside, who call by asking for help, even inviting them to stay overnight. This grudging act of charity leaves a sour taste, with Olivia unable to sleep for fear of the “refugees”, treating her guests more like prisoners.
Julien’s inscrutable, quietly subversive presence also awakens the sickly Agata’s rebellious streak. Bored to distraction with heavy-handed parental control, sterile rules and home-schooling lessons, she starts pushing against the bars of her gilded cage, flirting shamelessly with her new-found stepbrother and inviting him out for forbidden walks in the forest. Julien also revives long-dormant sexual feelings in Olivia, whose marriage has reached a frosty impasse. Aleksander, meanwhile, is obsessed with a competition prize offering a trip into space, firmly convinced this will validate his self-image as beloved dad to a perfect family, a desperate charade he is scrabbling to maintain at all costs.
Family Therapy was initially titled Redemption, and now sports the subtitle Redemption For Beginners, with further chapter headings emblazoned on screen throughout: The Chosen Ones for a deluxe dinner party that ends in chaos and injury, for example, or Under Control for a sequence in which the family begin to fall apart, as signalled by a heavily symbolic window cracking and breaking. While most of these headlines drip with irony, the final act hammers home this redemptive theme with far more heavy-handed sincerity. Here Prosenc substitutes scathing detachment for empathy, revealing her protagonists not as snobbish upper-class monsters but as sick, vulnerable, lonely, needy, typically flawed humans.
This sentimental pay-off is generous but, after two long hours, slow to arrive and oddly clumsy. Prosenc intends Family Therapy to critique how the wealthy increasingly isolate themselves from the rest of society, but in her rush to absolve everyone, she leaves too many issues unresolved, from Julien’s sexual transgressions to the thinly drawn poorer family’s lingering sense of injustice. If stripping down to your underwear and wrestling random strangers to the ground is evidence of emotional closure, then sure, we could call this a happy ending. But this audacious Slovenian rhapsody untimately bows out as a sporadically great misfire rather than the finely crafted, sharply observed, skewering satire promised during its first 90 minutes.
That said, on an aesthetic level, Family Therapy has plenty to excuse its ungainly plot and inconsistent characters. Prosenc and her team stuff every scene with visual riches, arty allusions and wry in-jokes, including an audio clip of Slovenian left-wing cultural critic Slavoj Zizek discussing Europe’s immigration anxieties during the “refugee” sequence. Cinematographer Mitja Licen also fills the screen with meticulously composed, brightly hued tableaux, including a live-action reaction of the famous portrait of Shakespeare’s Ophelia by 19th century painter John Everett Millais. A prominently deployed Baroque-pastiche score by electronic duo Silence, aka Primoz Hladnik and Boris Benko, blends Henry Purcell homages with hints of off-key dissonance, an elegant musical metaphor for the discord lurking below this family’s outwardly harmonious surface.
Director, screenwriter: Sonja Prosenc
Cast: Marko Mandic, Mila Bezjak, Katarina Stegnar, Aliocha Schneider, Judita Frankovic Brdar, Jure Henigman
Cinematography: Mitja Licen
Editing: Ivana Fumic
Production design: Tatjana Canic Stankovic
Costume designers: Dubravka Skvrce, Gilda Venturini
Music: Silence
Producers: Rok Secen, Sonja Prosenc
Production company, world sales: Monoo (Slovenia)
Venue: Sarajevo Film Festival (Feature Film Competition)
In Slovenian, English, French
122 minutes