Quiet Life (2024) Movie Drinking Game
Take a Drink: every time you feel the cold chill of bureaucracy
Take a Drink: for every visit to the hospital
Take a Drink: for every reference to past horrors in Russia
Do a Shot: for creepy smiles
By: Henry J. Fromage (A Toast) –
Child Resignation Syndrome is a mysterious illness that has stricken thousands of children, primarily refugees in the midst of asylum limbo, and strangely primarily those in Sweden coming from former Soviet states. Children withdraw from the world in degrees, and at its most severe, they even go into comas.
Quiet Life is in essence the story of one of these families, as their youngest daughter slips into a coma after they are told their asylum application has been rejected and they must return to Russia, where the father had been subject to a brutal attack for pro-democratic statements.
A Toast
There are many conventional and perhaps a touch dry manners in which you could tell this story, and yet director Alexandros Avranas goes a different way here. Early in his career he was tabbed as a member of the Greek Weird Wave, of which Yorgos Lanthimos is the most famous member, and one can see this still in the way he frames the cruelty of bureaucracy.
There’s a kind of comedy, or maybe better put, absurdity to the lack of humanity, an alienness that he plays up, but never too far past the bounds of realistic possibility. The smiling and other lessons that the parents are forced to take to supposedly help their child come back from their coma are terrifying and hilarious all at once, and all to plausible.
As this family’s plight tightens around them like a noose, the unbearable anxiety they feel is transposed to the viewer. The interrogation/deposition scene that may be their last hope for asylum is absolutely crushing. The older girl’s darting eyes as she lies to try and save her family- a burden no child should bear- convey a remarkable performance, one of several here. When things seem most hopeless, though, Avranas does something Lanthimos has never shown any interest in- he grasps the all-to-thin thread of hope that remains and follows it back to its source- this family and their love for each other. It’s a denouement as audacious in its humanity as any of the thrillingly inhumane ones the Greek Weird Wave has ever cooked up.
Verdict
Quiet Life is a mysterious and affecting story that may feel like political satire, but which is all too real to many refugees.
