This refugee story from Alexander Avranos seethes with despair but never fully surrenders to the darkness.
The very first scene of Alexandros Avranas’s haunting immigrant tale sets up its premise and the roles demanded of its central Russian refugee family. One by one, youngest daughter Katja (Miroslava Pashutina), her elder sister Alina (Naomi Lamp), their mother Natalia (Chulpan Khamatova) and finally taciturn father Sergei (Grigory Dobrygin) gather in the hall of their temporary accommodation, as if assembled for an idealized family portrait. It’s not a photo that will be taken, however. It’s a pitiless assessment of their suitability to remain in Sweden, the country to which they have fled, after Sergei, a dissident teacher, has been brutally attacked in their homeland: one that will gradually strip them of hope and humanity in a Kafka-esque bureaucratic system.
No matter how submissive and pliant to the application procedure they appear, nor how much of the Swedish language and culture they attempt to assimilate, it quickly becomes clear that the seemingly neutral asylum process they encounter, carried out by monotone clerks in blank, strip-lit offices, barely disguises an absence of empathy. Their claim is rejected. And when Sergei finally snaps, lifting his shirt to reveal the still-raw scar from his knifing, bellowing that the official look at him – she refuses, of course – they are marked as potential troublemakers, worsening their prospects.
The family still has one potential wildcard to play. Katja actually witnessed her father’s assault, though they shielded her from testifying to spare her additional trauma. When it now seems essential for the young girl to give evidence, she suddenly falls into a coma-like sleep. However, rather than treat this as further tragedy, the Swedish health system steps in, deciding that Katja be protected from her family and effectively isolates her in a hospital. “Don’t talk about the past, don’t mention asylum, and don’t talk about your problems or your anxiety,” they are advised. And so, if one is forced to suppress one’s own history and current predicament, what actually remains of that person, wherever they may be permitted to exist?
Katja’s affliction may appear a metaphor for the traumatic effects on children in such situations. But Avranos is actually drawing on a real condition called ‘Child Resignation Syndrome’, increasingly common among young people experiencing severe displacement and violence, who then shut down. Quiet Life deftly turns this into a fable-like epidemic – witness the sterile ward filled with anonymous, bed-ridden children – stretching naturalism into something more absurdist, more desperate, more sinister. Natalia and Sergei are enlisted into countenance classes, where subjects are forced to practice flexing their facial muscles into positive looks, even wear paper smiles. These barely conceal their rictus grins beneath.
It’s another telling parallel – the pantomime that refugees must endure in a system that simply refuses to deal with the real, roiling emotions under the surface. As if to confirm the mendacity of the entire process, Sergei endeavours to get Alina to replace her sister, forcing her to memorize the events of his attack and testify in her sister’s stead. Inevitably, she cracks under the pressure and, like her sister, succumbs to the sleeping sickness.
Avranos documents this with a spare, lingering, observant style, trapping the viewer into witnessing this downward spiral, helpless to intervene. The four actors playing the family are all excellent, and much of their fine work is simply reacting, or struggling to control their reactions, to indignity heaped upon indignity. Within this darkly clinical, constrictive world, rare moments of compassion shine through like a beacon. Assistant nurse Adriana (Eleni Roussinou), herself a former refugee, covertly offering solace, or an elderly Swedish woman providing shelter in her basement. The parents, too, eventually try to push back and re-establish some sense of normalcy, offering ice-cream treats to, or taking an impromptu road trip with, their comatose kids.
Quiet Life’s low-level desperation reflects so much of the refugee struggle worldwide. Yet Avranos and co-writer Stavros Pamballis refuse to abandon all hope. An ending that remains ambiguous offers a sliver of redemption, and this feels important in a world so riddled with inequality and state-sanctioned cruelty. Better to keep FIPRESCI deliberations discreet, but this refusal to completely surrender to despair clearly influenced our decision to award the film our prize at the European Film Festival Palić. Perhaps view it as a defiant statement to confront a complex, often overwhelming dilemma afflicting more and more people in the world today, and face it, eyes wide open, looking to the light.
Leigh Singer
©FIPRESCI 2025