A teenage girl sees a wealthy visitor to her coastal community as an
escape route from her controlling father.
Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović
Starring: Gracija Filipović, Leon Lučev, Danica Curcic, Cliff Curtis
At first glance, 16-year-old Julija (Gracija Filipovic) appears
to be living a life most of us would envy. She lives in a sun-blasted
small village on the coast of Croatia, where the weather is so good she
never has to wear anything other than a swimsuit. Working alongside her
father, she makes a living hunting for the eels that give the film its
title. Self-sufficiency in a sunny spot - isn't that the dream for many
of us?
Not for Julija. She longs to escape her life. With envy she watches
visiting tourists frolic on the beach and on boats, knowing that for
them this village is but a temporary playground. Julija however is stuck
here in the clutches of her psychologically if not physically abusive
father, Ante (Leon Lucev), who dismisses all her ambitions.
When an old foreign friend of Ante's, Javier (Cliff Curtis), who
is now a multi-millionaire businessman, arrives at the village, both
Ante and Julija see him as the potential solution to their problems.
Ante hopes he can convince Javier to invest in turning the village into
a fully fledged resort. Julija sees the way Javier and her mother, Nela
(Danica Curcic), look at one another, and sets in motion a plot
to convince Javier into taking these two unhappy women away with
him.
Murina boasts the sort of setup you might imagine being
exploited to its fullest by some perverted French filmmaker, but in the
hands of first time director Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović it's
surprisingly cold-blooded and passionless. The villain of the piece,
Ante, is something of a one-dimensional stock bitter middle-aged man.
There's no real depth to his antagonism or cruelty, and he's the sort of
character that might fit better in some noirish thriller about lovers
conspiring to knock off an unwanted husband. There's never any
suggestion that Julija plans anything so dramatic for her father, but
then again she doesn't seem to have any real plans at all.
This leads to a movie that lacks a satisfying narrative thrust. We're
left to admire the scenery, the lush cinematography of
Hélène Louvart and the quality of the performances, but there's
just not enough to invest in here. Julija wants away from her miserable
life, but that's as far as any sort of character development goes. We
never learn anything else about her ambitions, and she's as undeveloped
as her father. Julija escapes her surface misery by diving into the deep
blue sea, but it's just a riff on the old cliché of a troubled woman
dunking her head below the waterline of a bath. Filipovic impresses in
her feature debut, but like the character she's portraying, she seems to
be grasping for something the film keeps out of her reach.
Murina is in UK/ROI cinemas
from April 8th and in virtual cinemas from May 9th.
