“Family therapy is a wacky black comedy that is as ambitious as it is deeply disturbing.”
As the hackneyed (and perhaps somewhat controversial) saying goes: “A stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet” – and sometimes you meet these people in the most inconspicuous places, such as on the side of the road where their car is burning. This is the case with the protagonists at the centre of Family therapya deliciously perverse black comedy in which director Sonja Prosenc makes her recent directorial debut. The film tells the story of a wealthy Slovenian family who take in a stranger (who may or may not be their lost son), and eventually another displaced family they encounter on their way home to their remote country home where they live in secluded splendor. Over the course of what seems like just a few days, pleasantries begin to fade and sanity begins to wane, especially as it becomes increasingly clear that something far more disturbing is at play, particularly with regard to the patriarch’s intentions in embracing these new visitors and their role in his household. Reportedly inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Theorem (which also underwent another quasi-adaptation earlier this year, in Bruce LaBruce’s The visitor) and with elements reminiscent of the early Yorgos Lanthimos and a touch of Luis Buñuel, Family therapy is a wacky black comedy that’s as ambitious as it is deeply disturbing, handcrafted by a director whose keen eye for detail is matched only by her kooky narrative vision, and both are put to good use in this deeply unorthodox but endlessly entertaining foray into social class.
When writing satire, some of the sharpest and most biting are not political or religious in nature, but those that seek to satirize domesticity. This may seem strange until we realize that the family structure is the cornerstone of society and the root of every culture’s traditions and values, and attacking the simplest of subjects in this regard is essentially an act of dismantling society from its roots. It can be extraordinary when done right, and that is exactly the case with Family therapyin which Prosenc goes all out. Their approach, however, is quite different – rather than presenting us with a family that seems relatively normal at the beginning and then depicting their gradual descent into madness, they are instead immediately introduced to us with all their eccentricities, with their idea of a good time being leisurely driving through the countryside, listening to interviews from Slavoj Žižek or entering competitions that can send them into space (the latter is initially a trivial detail that becomes integral to the story as the film progresses). This makes it more than clear who these people are and what they represent. Over the course of the film, the director creates a film that focuses on depicting the gradual and methodical destruction of the perfect family balance. This destruction comes not from the wild outsiders they invite into their home out of the goodness of their hearts (in fact, this turns out to be a deliberate fallacy), but from the consequences of their own actions, which plunge them into a state of domestic chaos as they slide into irreversible disorganization. It’s a fascinating approach, certainly very different from what we’d normally expect from such a narrative, and one that forms the basis of many of its most inspiring elements.
To maintain the unorthodox character of the film, Prosenc develops Family therapy to be a more layered film in practice than it first appears. It’s clear from the start that it’s going to go in several unexpected directions, but the extent to which it’s willing to push itself is quite astonishing. It presents itself as a blackly humorous comedy of manners based on the clash of different social classes, and the hilarity that ensues when one interferes with the rule of the other; this suggests that the status quo exists for a reason, which is a relatively conventional source of satire. This is just the beginning, however, and it’s not long before the film hints at something much darker lurking beneath the surface. To get to Family therapy to call it dystopian might be a bit presumptuous, given that it all takes place in a recognizable version of reality, and the people and places are mostly understandable and familiar – but even so, there is something deeply sinister about how the director puts this film together, with the pitch-black humor slowly deviating from eliciting laughs and soon instilling a sense of dread that can only come from the sense of paranoia and panic that slowly envelops the film. This film is a masterful example of how tone is an exceptional narrative tool – it’s an intensely uncomfortable film, its constant tension creating the feeling that these characters are constantly on the brink of implosion, and it becomes subversive to the point that it’s actively quite unsettling. Once we realize that the humor is not there to entertain, but rather to reinforce the absurdity of the world these characters live in, it becomes clearer what the director wanted to achieve with this film, namely a deeply unconventional portrayal of society from a rather unique lens.
The process of making this film required a lot of attention to detail, and much of it was based on the characters and their definition. As the title suggests, Family therapy is driven almost entirely by the interactions of various characters as they endure a series of challenges. Unlike the type of family therapy we usually associate with the term, however, theirs is much less conventional, focusing less on resolving conflict and more on suppressing urges and erasing unpleasant memories to make them the epitome of an idyllic, perfect family unit. As you might expect, this is not the case at all, and Prosenc spends the majority of the film crafting a brutal indictment that is equally damning for characters on both sides of the socio-cultural divide that he so gleefully exploits, having nothing but the most severe contempt for each and every character and the social classes they represent, using their differences as fertile ground for a ruthless attack on the contemporary social system and its deliberate design to divide and confine everyone in their place. The actors are wholeheartedly committed to the premise – Marko Mandic is an absolute blast as a delusional patriarch with literally out-of-this-world ambitions, while Katarina Stegnar is equally fascinating as his seemingly stoic wife who proves to be just as disturbed, particularly when it comes to keeping up appearances, and provides a sharp contrast to Mila Bezjak as her brooding daughter. Even Aliocha Schneider, the young man who may be her son, turns out to be nowhere near as normal as he initially seems. Family therapy relies entirely on the ever-changing dynamics between the characters, and both the actors and director work to develop each individual role into a tailor-made pawn in this sophisticated psychological game of cat and mouse that, if the ambiguous ending is any indication, seems set to have a pretty grim outcome.
Until the climaxes, where a more conventional film would bring the various narrative strands together and present some sort of resolution, Family therapy goes in the opposite direction, choosing instead to wholeheartedly embrace the madness it has flirted with for nearly two hours. We may not get the answers we seek, but we do get something far more fascinating and compelling: a film made up of a stream of disjointed fragments, each offering a snapshot into the life of a dysfunctional family going about their daily lives while slowly drifting into a state of irreversible madness. The film begins as a light, quirky comedy, but the peculiar tone eventually reveals that something far more sinister is hiding; the looming sense of unease begins to take over, creating a disturbing and intense satire that says as much about this family and its interpersonal conflicts as it does about the outside world, becoming an allegory for our entire social and cultural system. By exploring the question of whether the perfect family can ever really exist, Prosenc constructs one of the most unusual and daring satires of the past year, a brave and ambitious existential odyssey that takes time to develop its ideas but actively involves us in the process. Incredibly funny and genuinely confusing. Family therapy takes the viewer on a convoluted journey to an ambiguous ending that doesn’t make much sense logically, but still leaves a deep impression based on the surrounding ideas and the journey we’ve taken to get to this point. It forces us to look deeper and engage in a sort of introspection to fully understand the many complex themes that drive this otherwise bold work of crazy, absurd art.
