![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Stepping outside of their bedrooms at night, let alone beyond the property’s bone-marked perimeter, is a strict taboo. Leading a harsh life of agrarian labour and god-fearing austerity, the children toil for their subsistence nourishment under the strict eye of their parents, who feed them an endless torrent of religious constraints while brutally disciplining any perceived transgressions, whether figurative or literal. Instead of a cave, director Dan Slater – co-writing with Adam Booth – gives us an isolated farmstead whose residents – Father (Nigel Bennett) and Mother (Toni Ellwand), their eldest son Caleb (Benjamin Charles Watson), daughters Abigail (Jenna Warren) and Evelyn (Yasmin Mackay), and youngest son Elijah (Onyx Spark) – are as much a family in the Charles Manson mould as a genetic unit (Caleb, for example, is black, whereas the rest are white). It is a quote from the section in Plato’s Republic on the Allegory of the Cave, advertising that what follows will involve narrow purviews and manipulated, artificial perspectives, far removed from the light of truth. ![]() “How could they see anything but the shadows if they were never allowed to move their heads?”, goes the text that opens The Family. The Family has its European première at the Easter Grimmfest, 2022 ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2023
Categories |