Venice 2024 Review: QUIET LIFE Subverts Expectations with Tense, Stylistically Fluid Exploration

Greek director Alexandros Avranas explores a weighty theme in Quiet Life, yet his approach oscillates between thriller and satire.

Set in Sweden's cold bureaucratic limbo, the film follows a Russian family grappling with the trauma of fleeing persecution in their homeland, only to face the added struggle of seeking asylum. The burden of whether they will be forced to return to a hostile environment rests heavily on their youngest daughter.

Avranas’s minimalist storytelling and austere visual style, prominent in his earlier films Miss Violence and Love Me Not, are evident in Quiet Life. Known for navigating the unsettling realms of personal and institutional violence, Avranas crafts emotionally charged atmospheres with sparse dialogue and stark compositions, building his films around a slow-burning tension.

Quiet Life fits seamlessly into the director´s signature framework. Inspired by real-life cases of Resignation Syndrome—a mysterious condition affecting refugee children in Sweden—the film centers on Sergei (Grigory Dobrygin) and Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova), parents whose youngest daughter Katja (Miroslava Pashutina) collapses into a coma after their asylum application is denied. The family’s temporary, antiseptic housing is soon replaced by an equally clinical hospital, where Katja lies alongside other children similarly afflicted by the syndrome.

Though primarily a family drama with strong political undertones, Quiet Life adopts the tone of a dystopian thriller. The initial inspection by the Swedish Migration Board in their impersonal, catalog-like home unfolds with a disconcerting lack of emotion, as though the officials are examining androinds rather than people. Avranas’s deliberate use of misaligned style emphasizes the mystery surrounding the syndrome, which disproportionately affects refugee children from former Soviet or war-torn countries like Yugoslavia.

The anti-climactic assessment of the family’s residency status takes place in a similarly sterile environment, with unemotional bureaucrats delivering the decision. Sergei, Natalia, and their daughters remain outwardly composed until they learn that their visa has been denied.

With only a few days to provide further evidence of persecution, their youngest daughter Katja collapses in a schoolyard. The sequence, shot from a second-person perspective, captures her walk to school, combining sterile compositions and tight object shots to generate a mounting tension reminiscent of Michael Haneke’s social thrillers.

Once hospitalized, Katja’s coma prevents the family from being deported, effectively granting them borrowed time in Sweden. Katja was meant to testify about the attack that forced them to flee Russia, but in her absence, Sergei decides their older daughter Alina (Naomi Lamp) must take on the role. He begins coaching her, employing emotional manipulation to ensure her focus.

Meanwhile, the parents regularly visit Katja in the hospital, where Avranas adopts a sci-fi-like aesthetic. To continue seeing their daughter, Sergei and Natalia are required to complete a course on how to interact with comatose children and prevent further cases of Resignation Syndrome. At this point, Avranas unexpectedly veers into satire, invoking an echo of Dogtooth, though without its more perverse aspects.

In the film’s final act, Avranas shifts tone once again, returning to the family’s struggle against the bureaucratic system. The intense atmosphere is gradually released, leading to a somewhat subdued and slightly surreal conclusion.

The film closes with a conventional information explanating of Resignation Syndrome, complete with recent statistics. Avranas fluidly shifts between tones, blending influences from filmmakers like Haneke and Yorgos Lanthimos into a sparse and ambiguous drama.

Visually, Quiet Life reflects the director’s preference for stark, clinical settings. It begins in an observational style, with muted colors and a detached camera that underscores the bleakness of the family’s situation. As the narrative progresses, the visuals shift toward more symbolic and surreal elements, mirroring the characters' growing emotional and psychological disintegration. Avranas’s use of confined domestic spaces further amplifies the sense of claustrophobia.

While Quiet Life continues Avranas’s minimalist style and addresses social and political issues, the director intriguingly resists full adherence to the Greek New Wave while simultaneously embracing aspects of it. The film’s stylistic hybridity—at once unsettling and captivating—contributes to its overall ambiguity. If anything, Quiet Life consistently subverts expectations and challenges conventions in terms of genre, style and execution.