Reemerging from the depths, Julija domineers her plot toward familial implosion, whilst her father and mother interrupt her intentions via berating and lecturing that the capacity she has for understanding the dynamics at play is immensely deficient due to the plain fact of her youth, and therein her lack of context. Genre codes take a breakneck shift into the territory of thriller after an extended, anomalous sequence of silent underwater exchange. It’s only come the hour mark that the illusory affects of the opening shot suddenly emerge from their dormancy. There’s a lack of vitality in its compositional intentions that wears the work out, rendering intimate drama into platitudinous friction.
What’s most obstructing to the film is its often handheld cinematography where medium close-ups and medium-wide shots engage in exchanges of apathy. Initially fatigued by trite dynamics - the father’s incessant abuse both exhausting and, lacking imaginative formal presentation, derivative - the film’s austerity comes to inform a haggardness that weighs down any empathic response, each facet of this drama performing banality.
Murina centers Julija as she cautiously schemes to replace her abhorrent patriarch with his lax, inviting friend who shares a mysterious, sensual history with her mother. In manners, this opening shot foreshadows the winding tonality of the film itself. At first hypnotic, the image weaves in and out of regard, the geography of the space becoming more legible by the second, the illusion losing its dominance, followed closely by our focal characters, Julija and Ante (daughter and father, respectively), diving toward us, the camera failing to maneuver around their momentum and forcing, finally, a cut. In the opening shot of Antoneta Alamat Kusijanović’s debut feature Murina, an adaptation of her short Into the Blue, we patiently sit underneath the waves, light refracting off the surface and manifesting illusions of stingray-like patterns that move in tandem with the tide. Murina ‘s second half almost helps the film realize its pursuit of unsettling inquiry, but outside of its opening and closing shots, there’s too little formal inventiveness and too many trite motivating dynamics.
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