A Film a Week - Good Children / Dobra djeca

 previously published on Cineuropa

We mature, we age and our lives change, but does the dynamic between siblings morph as time passes by, or do they stay attached to the patterns of behaviour they developed in their childhood and youth? Those are the questions that up-and-coming Croatian filmmaker Filip Peruzović asks in his feature-length debut, Good Children, which has just premiered in the 1-2 Competition of the 40th Warsaw Film Festival.

Nikola (Filip Šovagović, of No Man’s Land fame) and Saša (Nina Violić, most recently glimpsed in Good Times, Bad Times) are siblings on a specific mission: to clean up a large house after their mother’s death. Saša has her whole life and family in Canada, so time is of the essence. Contrary to his sister, Nikola seems like a bit of an idler, stuck in a rut in his own life, so he clings to both the objects and the sentiments of the past. During breaks from cleaning the house, getting rid of the furniture and packing up the memorabilia, they have conversations that quickly turn from mundane to passive-aggressive and, afterwards, play games like they did in their childhood, which fuel the toxicity of their relationship even more.

The script, written by the filmmaker and Nikolina Bogdanović, shows the differences in character between the two slowly and tactfully, but also in great detail. As a director, Peruzović creates the notion of the separate worlds they live in and of the one they have to share owing to these specific circumstances. He does so by employing Tomislav Sutlar’s hand-held camerawork at short-to-medium distance, imbuing the movie with warm, patinated colours. This world seems to be stuck in the era of their childhood, or even before that, thanks to Dino Topolnjak’s production design full of objects from Yugoslav times that appear to be in daily use. On the other hand, the striking sound design by Ivan Zelić, consisting of both interior and neighbourhood noises, reminds us that we are watching a contemporary story, and the fusion of the two makes it appear timeless and universal.

Largely a two-hander, except for the sequence in which the neighbour (Vinko Kraljević) comes to offer his condolences and try to retrieve a trimmer he lent to their mother a while ago, which sparks one more awkward conversation, Good Children depends heavily on the two main actors. Both of these thesps are more than capable of holding our attention individually and on their own terms, while the chemistry between them seems playful, natural and completely believable, making the film an easy watch.

On the other hand, even despite the running time that clocks in at 78 minutes, Good Children has a bit of an aura of an extended short, since most of the plot, the atmosphere, the relationships and the sprinkling of details could easily be laid out in under 30 minutes, even while keeping the deliberately slow pacing in Iva Ivan’s editing, which suits the situation that the characters find themselves in perfectly well. This should not come as a surprise, given that Peruzović mastered the short format before moving on to the feature one, ranging from his early work Tetrapak (2010) to Sinking Objects (2018), which was also included in the Deep Cuts omnibus. But in the end, the longer format offers the opportunity for the slow passing of time to be felt more intensely, and Peruzović seizes it, making Good Children more than a solid debut.