Everybody in Our Family

Only wanting to take his five-year-old daughter Sofia to the beach, Marius (Serban Pavlu) finds himself callously stonewalled by his ex-wife Otilia (Mihaela Sirbu), who insists the girl is ill. Seemingly trapped in his own version of Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel, Marius proves incapable of leaving Otilia’s apartment, with or without his daughter in tow. And the longer the ex-partners spend in one another’s company, the more they live down to their bad reputations: Otilia transforms into the inhumane monster that Marius assured everyone she wasn’t, while he devolves into the raving lunatic that everyone has accused him of being. And so it happens that absurdity escalates into outright insanity in this verbose, vitriolic comedy of ill manners from Radu Jude (The Happiest Girl in the World, VIFF 09). As a domestic disturbance of epic proportions erupts, it becomes plainly apparent that Marius really should’ve heeded his father when he asserted, "One can’t control anything. Everything is chaos."

"A masterwork of black comedy and suspense… Tense to the point of exhaustion, brilliantly shot to evoke a real-time effect, and filled with immersive long takes and naturalistic performances… [it] chronicles the dissolution of family bonds with relentless innovation. Even when heartbreakingly honest and sad, it still manages to sustain a heightened sense of hilarity."—Eric Kohn, Indiewire