The arrival of a visitor forces a family's long-simmering tensions into the open in this outstanding debut from the Croatian director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanovic.
A steadily gripping feature debut from the Croatian writer-director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović , “Murina” takes place over a fraught few days that dangle a possible liberation from that tragedy.Javier , a wealthy businessman and an old friend and colleague of Ante’s, has come to stay at their island home for a few days, bringing an entourage that quickly thins out as the ostensible reason for his visit becomes apparent.
At times overpowering in its sun-drenched sense of place, “Murina” reveals each corner of this private world to us with a cool, dispassionate gaze. The water’s surface glints and undulates with sinister beauty in the movie’s wide-screen images . Much of the story unfolds aboard a boat, sailing through waters that Ante, Nela and Julija know all too well even as it steers them into dangerously new emotional territory.
The tightly wound physicality of Lučev’s literally upping-the-Ante performance — the menace compacted into his dad-bod frame, the unhesitating way he hurls Julija off the side of their boat in response to a perceived slight — implies a history of perhaps physical and certainly emotional abuse. Julija has long bitten her tongue in response, and Filipović’s intelligent, watchful performance is a study in quiet defiance giving way, at last, to something more. Her dream of escape may well be a delusion; Javier, for all the promise he represents, is at best a knight in tarnished armor, as well as a man with burdens and anxieties of his own.
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