Sonja Prosenc’s “Family Therapy” is a study of dysfunctional family ties spruced up with a slew of oddities. The emphasis is placed on splintered bonding, which is accentuated with the arrival of a stranger. Olivia (Katarina Stegnar) and Aleksander (Marko Mandic) lead a quiet, unbothered life in their plush mansion in the middle of the woods with their teenage daughter.
The sterility of the swanky Kralj house is constantly being focused on. A certain coldness seems to leak from the elegantly sober walls themselves. Chatter among them is clipped. Nevertheless, the family keeps up its appearance, and everything is perfectly fine. But it doesn’t take much of a provocation for the parents’ elaborately mannered lifestyle and habits to indicate signs of steady rupture that has long been in the offing. All it needed was someone to pop up and tip them over the edge, revealing the fractures, resentments, and repressed anxieties. The film opens with the sudden arrival of Aleks’ son from a previous relationship, Julien (Aliocha Schneider). He becomes the perfect trigger.
Julien is a misfit in the elite echelons where the Kraljs are ensconced. However, he doesn’t display the slightest bit of discomfort. Julien is sure of his roots. He knows the strength in it and fully embraces it. There’s no denial or awkwardness in him for having a humble background. Instead, he remains perfectly at home and unhesitant to go to such posh environs as well. The gulf between how he has been in his life and where he finds himself now doesn’t limit him but emboldens him to put forth a string of challenges to the family of three, who seem visibly stressed in accommodating an outlier like him.
Quickly, he starts inciting a rebellion of sorts and disrupting the façade of genteel control that pervades the house. Everyone seems to be wilfully tucking away their exhaustion at the wretchedness of the circumstances, but they don’t express it overtly. The dissatisfaction lingers around the edges of the dynamics, slinking nevertheless an undeniably abiding presence.
There’s a lot of curdled, thickly hidden hate and antagonism, ill will, and a severe mismatch in wavelengths between the couple and the parent-child equation. Their daughter, Agata (Mila Bezjak), fumes at them for homeschooling her after she was diagnosed with leukemia. Olivia and Aleks keep her fixedly at home. She pines for friendships, but her parents insist that only this arrangement can guarantee her safety. It’s best she sticks within the walls of the house.
Olivia and Aleks are so deeply cooped up in their silo that any stranger who evinces the slightest trace of being from a markedly different class warrants immediate suspicion. So, when another family comes seeking shelter in the middle of the night, the Kraljs’ first impulse is to wholly ignore their desperate knocking on the door. The family’s car has broken down. The Kraljs speculate if they are refugees. The family is, in fact, the same one whom the Kraljs had passed earlier that day. Julien had been startled then at their deliberate obliviousness. Now, he takes charge of the situation. He steps forth and lets the disadvantaged family in.
The Kraljs, overtaken with deep-seated fear, even lock up the room they gave to the family for staying the night. The next morning, a surprised Julien lets them out. Upon seeing the family gone, Olivia and Aleks immediately inspect for any probable theft. This is only the first section in “Family Therapy,” which gradually unravels the disintegrating shockwaves within the elite family as each comes to terms with their individual blind spots, flaws, and aches.
Olivia reckons with her growing disinterest in her marriage, while Aleks cannot quite own up to the sustained rough patch in his writing. With a frequent, generous swell of Vivaldi and Purcell’s music, the drama is shaded with wacky, surreal doses, swinging erratically between tragic expressions and absurdly comic interruptions.
Transgressions occur aplenty; Prosenc tells the story with levity, mischief, and tendencies to kookily heighten a situation. The triumph of “Family Therapy” is in its adroit mix of cool compositions and bold, stylized leaps that bring and enhance a strange mood to the tale.
