MIFF NOTES: These Are the Rules (2015, Dir. Ognjen Sviličić)

These Are The Rules is a film that wears its themes in its title. In downtown Zagreb, everything has a way to be done. For Ivo and Maja (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic and Jasna Zalica) this means there is a certain way to do the dishes, to cook the eggs, to watch the television.

It also means there is a certain way to investigate the assault of their teenage son.

There's a quiet bureaucratic menace that slowly (ever so slowly) creeps to the surface of Ognjen Sviličić's film. Everything has a threatened soft power, which Sviličić uses to understatedly interrogate the entrenched, almost invisible oppression at play in his home country.

Boosted by its rounded performances, These Are The Rules succeeds resoundingly in its tightly framed domestic scope. Unfortunately, when Sviličić steps outsides these self-imposed boundaries and has his despairing father turn reluctant vigilante the painful apathy of the film is trampled. It loses some of the elegance that its out-of-our-control narrative had nurtured to good effect.

Still worth the watch.

★★★

Trailer:

These Are the Rules screened at the Melbourne International Film Festival 2015.