Here's a dysfunctional family for you--when we first meet Lily, she's arranging the other four members of her family on the living room couch so that she can sit between them for a selfie which she plans to enter in a family portrait contest, and there's no need to ask everyone to hold still since they're all dead.
FAMILY (Indiepix, 2017) begins with this clearly insane (or, at the least, very very disturbed) young woman engaging in the most unimaginable things in a matter-of-fact way, telling us in voiceover that sometimes you just go ahead and do things you shouldn't because you refrained from them often enough as to have become numbed to the possible consequences.
And since Lily has obviously "gone ahead" and done whatever she's done, we're made to wonder what in the heck led up to all this, which writer-director Veronica Kedar's morbidly absorbing little nightmare narrative then reveals to us in its own sweet time.
Lily takes a nocturnal bike ride to her therapist's luxurious apartment for what she describes as an "emergency session" through the closed door to the shrink's bratty teenaged daughter Talia (Tommy Baremboem).
Finally allowed admittance, Lily must then contend with the abrasive and aggressively curious young girl's insistence on hearing what has led Lily to such a desperate state. Gradually, Lily is coaxed to reveal it all in dribs and drabs that draw us in right along with Talia, herself a troubled girl with Mommy issues.
What we discover is a fervidly Freudian spookhouse which serves as Lily's everyday world, twisting her already warped psyche a bit more with each passing day. Her bleak family home is a daily psycho drama populated by severely disturbed older sister Smadar (Hen Yanni), who must be kept locked in her bedroom, and a harried wreck of a mother who doesn't know whether to slap, comfort, or ignore them, finally doing all three while sinking slowly into her own mental morass.
Lily's abusive father (Eli Danker) has long since skipped out and washed his hands of the whole bunch, while her brother Adam (Arie Hassfari), whose creepily incestuous nature betrays his own mental maladjustments, seeks refuge in the military but is driven over the edge when he returns home to find that things have finally taken a turn for the worst.
Lily herself is an interesting study in quiet, passive madness, disaffected to the point of expressing little or no outward emotion during the most profoundly distressing events. Not quite a powderkeg waiting to explode, she's more like a mechanical device whose inner workings are wearing down to the eventual point of critical malfunction.
With all these elements in play, Kedar (who gives an absorbing performance as Lily) draws us down an ever-darkening path which will include murder and suicide, with Lily acting as both victim and instigator of the circumstances leading to her family's demise as well as her own deteriorating mental state.
FAMILY is a dark but beautifully-shot film whose formal directorial style contrasts with the madness and dizzying imagery we witness and makes it even more jarring, showing us both the dreadful tragedy and unspeakable horror which can emerge from the intimate interactions of such a way-wrong combination of disturbed individuals.
Buy it from Indiepix Films
RUNTIME - 101 minutes
RATING - Not Rated
YEAR - 2017
FORMAT - DVD Region All
COUNTRY - Israel
LANGUAGE - Hebrew
SUBTITLES - English
ATTRIBUTES - Widescreen, Color, Stereo
BONUS - Trailer
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