“Family Therapy is an off-the-wall dark comedy that is as ambitious as it is profoundly unsettling.”

As the well-worn (and perhaps somewhat controversial) adage goes, “a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet” – and sometimes, you encounter these people in the most obscure of places, such as the side of the road as their car is ablaze. This is the case for the protagonists at the heart of Family Therapy, a delightfully perverse dark comedy in which director Sonja Prosenc makes her most recent directorial outing. The film tells the story of a wealthy Slovenian family who takes in a stranger (who may or may not be their prodigal son), as well as eventually another displaced family who they come across while making their way home to their secluded mansion in the countryside, where they live in isolated splendour. Over the course of what appears to be only a few days, the pleasantries begin to fade and sanity starts to erode, especially when it becomes increasingly clear that something far more unsettling is at play, particularly in terms of the patriarch’s intentions to embrace these new visitors and their role within his household. Ostensibly inspired by Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema (which was also subjected to another quasi-adaptation earlier this year in Bruce LaBruce’s The Visitor), and featuring elements that echo the likes of early Yorgos Lanthimos and a touch of Luis Buñuel, Family Therapy is an off-the-wall dark comedy that is as ambitious as it is profoundly unsettling, handcrafted by a director whose keen eye for detail is only matched by her deranged narrative vision, both of which are put to good use in this deeply unorthodox but endlessly entertaining romp through the social classes.

When crafting satire, some of the sharpest and most scathing are not political or religious in nature, but rather those that intend to lampoon domesticity. This may seem peculiar until we realize that family structure is the cornerstone of society and the root of every culture’s traditions and values, and targeting the simplest of subjects in this regard is essentially an act of dismantling society from its roots. It can be exceptional when done right, which is precisely the case with Family Therapy, in which Prosenc aims for the jugular. However, her approach is quite different – rather than presenting us with a family that seems relatively normal at the outset and then depicting their gradual descent into madness, we are instead immediately introduced to them with their eccentricities fully on display, where their idea of a good time is leisurely drives through the countryside listening to Slavoj Žižek interviews or entering competitions where they could be sent to outer space (the latter a trivial detail at first that becomes integral to the story as the film progresses). This makes it abundantly clear who these people are and what they represent. Over the course of the film the director crafts a film that is focused on depicting the gradual and methodical corruption of the perfect family balance, which isn’t done by the savage outsiders whom they invite into their home out of the goodness of their hearts (in fact, this proves to be an intentional non-sequitur), but rather the consequences of their own actions, plunging them into a state of domestic chaos as they descend into irreversible disorganization. It’s a fascinating approach that is certainly quite different from what we would typically expect from such a narrative, and is at the root of many of its most inspired elements.

To maintain the unorthodox nature of the film, Prosenc develops Family Therapy to be a far more layered film in practice than it seems to be at a cursory glance. It is clear at the outset that this is going to go in several unexpected directions, but the extent to which it is willing to push itself is quite astonishing. It promotes itself as a darkly humorous comedy-of-manners based around the clash of different social strata, and the hilarity that ensues when one impinges on the dominion of the other; this suggests that the status quo exists for a reason, which is a relatively conventional source of satire. However, this is only the start, and it doesn’t take long for the film to begin hinting at something much darker lurking beneath the surface. To refer to Family Therapy as dystopian may be somewhat presumptuous, since everything takes place within a recognizable version of reality and the people and places are mostly comprehensible and familiar – yet there is something profoundly uncanny about how the director puts this film together, with the pitch-black humour slowly shifting away from evoking laughter and soon instilling a sense of dread that can only come from the sense of paranoia and panic that slowly envelopes the film. This film is a masterful example of how tone is an exceptional narrative tool – it is an extremely uncomfortable film, with the constant tension creating the sense that these characters are perpetually on the verge of implosion, and it becomes subversive to the point of being actively quite unnerving. Once we realize the humour is not there to entertain but rather to amplify the absurdity of the world in which these characters reside, the clearer it becomes what the director intended to achieve with this film, which was a deeply unconventional depiction of society from a unique lens.

The process of crafting this film required a lot of attention to detail, and much of this came down to the characters and how they were defined. As the title would suggest, Family Therapy is driven almost entirely by the interactions of various characters as they endure a set of challenges. However, unlike the kind of family therapy that we would normally associate with the term, theirs is much less conventional and focused less on resolving conflict and more on suppressing urges and erasing uncomfortable memories to allow them to be the epitome of an idyllic, perfect familial unit. As we would expect this is not the case at all, and Prosenc spends most of the film crafting a brutal indictment that is equally scathing to characters on both sides of the socio-cultural divide it so gleefully exploits, holding nothing but the most severe contempt for every single character and the social classes that they represent, and using their differences as fertile ground for a ruthless attack on the contemporary social system and how it is intentionally designed to sow division and keep everyone in their place. The actors are wholeheartedly committed to the premise – Marko Mandic is an absolute riot as the delusional patriarch with aspirations that are quite literally out of this world, whereas Katarina Stegnar is just as fascinating as his seemingly stoic wife who proves to be equally deranged, particularly when it comes to keeping up appearances, and is sharply contrasted by Mila Bezjak as their brooding daughter. Even Aliocha Schneider, the young man who may be their son, proves to be not nearly as normal as he appears at the outset. Family Therapy is built from the constantly shifting dynamics between characters, and both the actors and the director work to develop each individual role as a bespoke pawn in this ambitious game of psychological cat-and-mouse that seems to have quite a grim outlook if the ambiguous ending holds any weight.

By the time it reaches its climactic moments, where a more conventional film would begin to tie together its various narrative threads and present some form of resolution, Family Therapy goes in the opposite direction, choosing instead to wholeheartedly embrace the madness with which it had been flirting for nearly two hours. We may not get the answers we seek, but instead receive something far more intriguing and engrossing: a film constituted of a stream of disjointed fragments, each one offering a snapshot into the life of a dysfunctional family as they go about their daily routine while they are slowly descending into a state of irrevocable madness. The film starts as a lightweight, zany comedy, but the peculiar tone eventually reveals itself to be hiding something far more sinister; the encroaching sense of discomfort begins to take over, creating an unsettling and intense satire that says as much about this family and their interpersonal conflicts as it does about the outside world, becoming an allegory for our entire social and cultural system. Throughout questioning whether or not the perfect family can ever truly exist, Prosenc constructs one of the most unusual and daring satires of the past year, a bold and ambitious existential odyssey that takes time to develop its ideas but keeps us actively engaged in the process. Wickedly funny and genuinely disorienting, Family Therapy takes the viewer on a winding journey to reach an ambiguous ending that doesn’t make much sense in terms of logic, but still leaves a profound impression based on the surrounding ideas and the voyage we took to get to that point. It forces us to look deeper and engage in some kind of introspection to understand precisely the many complex themes that drive this otherwise audacious work of unhinged, absurdist artistry.