After the death of their mother, a brother and sister meet up again at her secluded house in Sveta Nedelja. The brother was living there, taking care of the mother, while the sister came from America back for the funeral. They clean up the house and she is angry when she finds lice under the mattress. They argue, make up, recall their childhood and enjoy in nature. He finally sells the house and moves out, while she leaves Croatia.
Despite attempts at meditative cinema in rural area, Filip Peruzovic's feature length debut film "Good Children" is too overstretched and too weak to engage from any cinematic azimuth. This minimalistic film (only two characters, located only on one location, with very little dialogue) deliberately leaves out some crucial information and thus wants to disentangle from any kind of narrative standards, leaving up to the viewers to fill out some gaps in the unsaid things between the brother and sister in the empty house. However, this way, it simply isn't engaging nor interesting, and becomes boring fairly quickly. It has a few aesthetic frames (brother and sister looking at the lights in Zagreb from the hill in the forest; the sister on a swing while the wind is blowing, announcing a storm; a lightning bolt in the night sky in the forest) which somewhat salvage the impression here and there. But the majority is just too thin to carry this as a feature, since this should have been a 25 minute film. When the only "highlight" that 'twitches' the grey mood is when a third character, a neighbor, shows up for guests in the living room, and there is a 10-minute static shot of him talking with the brother and sister, it just isn't sustainable without some intruige or interesting plot.
Grade:+
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