Alexandros Avranas likes to make horror films that aren’t horror films.
In 2013, the Greek director took home the Silver Lion for Miss Violence, an unbearably dark domestic drama about a father putting his family through unspeakable abuse. Gruelling exploitation dressed up as edgy arthouse fare, it’s a tightly controlled, well-made film you’ll never want to sit through a second time.
Avranas returns this year with Quiet Life (2024), another type of horror-but-not-horror film about Sergei (Grigory Dobrygin), a former school principal from Russia attempting to gain asylum in Sweden with wife Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova) and daughters Alina and Katja (Naomi Lamp and Miroslava Pashutina).
Sergei was accused of handing out banned text and faced violent repercussions. We first meet his family the night before a home visit from a pair of government employees and their final interview that could grant them permanent residence. The family members come into the frame one by one, posing as if for an official portrait, giving off an air of nervousness and preparedness — but also intimidation. They’re vulnerable and terrified; the social worker’s odd, cold demeanour and probing questions do nothing to help put them at ease.
The following day, an interview conducted by a suspicious and unfriendly bureaucrat in a sterile room with an offscreen translator speaking over everyone, creates the feeling the family is talking to robots and not real human beings. Shortly after their application is rejected due to a lack of corroborating testimony and witnesses, Katja, the younger of two sisters, falls into a state known as Child Resignation Syndrome, a condition that Swedish doctors started noticing in children of asylum seekers in the 90s. Kids would withdraw almost completely, becoming motionless and refusing to talk, for varying periods.
Deeply dehumanising doesn’t even begin to describe what the family is forced to endure after their daughter is hospitalised. The government treats them with suspicion, grilling them further, even hinting they think the child could have been poisoned. They’re eventually forced to take drastic measures that put Alina’s well-being at risk.
It’s harrowing stuff, but Avranas doesn’t heap nearly as much abuse upon the audience as he did with Miss Violence (that long rape scene with a teenager was particularly hard to sit through). But the film does present a sort of Murphy’s Law situation, where anything that could go wrong, does.
Things get progressively worse for the family, and we’re trapped in the nightmare with them. It’s painful, hopeless cinema…until it isn’t. A dramatic set of events that are best left unspoiled offer a tiny sliver of hope, leading to a stellar third act that further indicts how medical-related situations in the asylum process are addressed.
The recurring theme here is that state agencies are completely out of touch with basic humanity. Avranas portrays Swedish bureaucracy as frigid and degrading, a Kafka-esque nightmare conducted by a borderline fascistic state. Anytime the family interacts with the government, the film takes on a surreal, dystopian energy, like when the parents are receiving training on how to smile properly and hide their emotions from their kids, or when we see a hospital room with numerous other comatose children suffering from the same condition.
Quiet Life is an urgent, provocative and timely film, one that applies not to just children of asylum-seekers in Sweden, but to all families experiencing trauma due to war, genocide, political persecution, threats of mass deportation and other precarious situations. The message is unavoidable: innocent young people continue to be harmed by politics, and in the absence of massive policy changes, the countries in which they seek refuge continue to re-traumatise them. We can do better.
Jared loves movies and lives with Kiki in Berlin.