Istanbul 2015 Review: THESE ARE THE RULES Provokes With Civil Horror

Bus driver Ivo (Emir Hadzihafizbegovic) and his spouse Maja (Jasna Zalica) are an ordinary middle-aged couple living a routine life in a block of apartments. Their calm and unexcited life peppered by everyday bickering will soon come crashing down as the parents discover their teenage son has been severely beaten. Tomica (Hrvoje Vladisavljevic) comes home one morning, just as his parents are getting up. They let him recuperate the missing energy after what they consider to be a long night of partying. As soon as he emerges from the bedroom, his bruises lure the unwanted attention of his parents and a decision is made: a medical check-up is inevitable. Various tests are given. To the comfort of Tomica and his parents, nothing serious that a few days in bed wouldn´t remedy is unveiled. After returning back home and slipping into the good old routine, tables suddenly turn when Tomica's unconscious body is found laying in the bathroom. 

And that´s the cue for the slow-burning, minimalistic yet naturalistic family drama Sviličić carefully orchestrates. Occurring mostly at two places, home and hospital, the Croatian director who also penned the script attentively lays out the chain of scenes nonchalantly, while implicitly mounting the tension and disbelief. Tomica ends up on machines in the hospital, leaving the parents to gaze in awe, still unable to comprehend how could such an error of judgement happened by trained doctors. However, their Calvary is just ahead of them as Ivo and Maja verge through a Purgatory of Kafkaesque hospital bureaucracy and general indifference after their teenaged son´s unforeseeable demise. 

Sviličić virtuously creates a detached atmosphere after the couple receives the worst piece of news any parent could by restraining emotional register, which resembles a mind either slowly processing the unjust and perverse twist of fate, or maybe just refusing to admit the life-changing event. Complete exclusion of the melodramatic tempest drives the absurdness to the stabbing cold tip. Emir Hadzihafizbegovic in his compelling performance as the perplexed father striving to get his head around the nefarious situation excels. His previous performance in the one-take comedy, The Death of a Man on Balkan, is not the ideal reference material in this case. Hadzihafizbegovic clinched the Venice Horizons Award for Best Actor for the overpowering performance. 

The juxtaposition of the two environments constitutes a clear-cut frontier between two worlds. Ivo humbly follows the protocols to fulfill the necessary administrative tasks related to the recently deceased, which sink further and further into the ridiculousness. The collision of the father who lost a child has even a more devastating effects when you consider the sterile approach and bureaucracy of the hospital staff.

The director delicately builds an irreal and eerie overbearing feeling mostly channeled through Emir Hadzihafizbegovic and his bemused expression. These Are the Rules achieves unexpected ambivalence as the family tragedy starts to oscillate between two poles. The inflating absurdity of the situation the parents must endure stretches to dark comedic corners, while the overall nuanced style stripped of melodrama, accumulates the suffocating dread near to Haneke´s brand of civil horror. 

Benedek Fligeauf´s precise pacing and construction of the narrative in Just the Wind was able to trigger a stomach-churning sickness after reaching the final scene, and Sviličić wields the power to initiate similar, almost physical, discomfort. The one that doesn't ram the front door, but comes creeping in from behind. In the same way as Fliegauf's film, Sviličić is doing it for a cause.