Larry Oliver Film Reviews

  Pictured :  Michal ( Milan Ondrík ) is prevented from rushing to the scene of a crime in a scene from Slovak co-writer-director  Tereza Nvotová 's third feature, Otec ( Father ). Still courtesy of Intra Films (Slovakia)   Some directors make incredible leaps between one movie and the next. Did we really expect Steven Spielberg to move from the cinema of suspense ( Jaws ) to that of wonder ( Close Encounters of The Third Kind )? Or George Lucas to move from redefining 1960s nostalgia in an apolitical way ( American Graffiti ) to creating a science fantasy franchise ( Star Wars )? Slovak writer-director Tereza Nvotová makes a similar progression from her second feature Nightsiren (released in 2022) to her third, Otec ( Father ), which she boldly stages the action in a series of single takes (the generic term is ‘oners’). Not only does Nvotová create a sense of unease from the opening moments, as she introduces the protagonist, publishing company boss Michal (...

  As pleased as I am to feature a Slovakian film in this series (the first), I confess to being disappointed with Nightsiren ( Svetlonoc ), directed by Tereza Nvotov á from a screenplay she co-wrote with Barbora Namerova, their second collaboration after Nvotov á ’s 2017 film, Filthy . It’s a not-so-everyday tale of a young woman who returns to the village she fled as a child to reclaim her inheritance and is treated as a witch by a community inculcated with misogyny. Things come to a head in the seventh chapter when two young children go missing and male outrage reaches tipping point. Where it fails is in rooting superstition in a believable context. Even allowing for the lack of television in a rural community that slaughters geese, they are exposed to modern hospitals and computers. I wondered why Nvotov á and Namerova didn’t instead focus on a community that chose to believe superstition to deal with reality rather than accept the modern world. They go to church but that’s n...