Attenberg: Critic Reviews

"Attenberg" is a three-layered love story, anatomizing the mysterious emotions of grief, friendship and erotic attraction.

It offers its audience a mordant commentary on modern Greece - deriding its cultural and social decay, though without commenting directly on economic difficulties - and affects a serio-comic, quasi-anthropological detachment.

Part of the film's success comes from Labed's performance as Marina, who infuses all that weirdness with a barely there vulnerability.

A cracked coming-of-age tale set in a fading Greek seaside town.

In that isolation, and in the marooned hopelessness of the protagonists, there is a hint that normal life may have become too much to cope with, and that its rules of engagement need to be learned afresh.

Attenberg remains a captivating and vaguely disturbing experience throughout.

The film succeeds not only as an idiosyncratic spin on the coming-of-age story but a wider comment on what it means to be fully human and fully alive in an age of diminished expectations.

What a strange, moving, puzzling, funny, frustrating and ultimately absorbing film this is.

Attenberg is distinguished aesthetically by cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis eye for both the beauty of coastal Greece and the hideousness of its mineral factories, conveying, like the film itself, the life-giving and life-taking moments in our lifetimes

Using occasional song-and-dance numbers with a melancholy Godardian kick, [Tsangari] creates a world that's off-center and alive with loneliness.

Works somewhat as a perverse droll coming-of-age film

Bittersweet, Greek coming-of-age drama about an inexperienced young woman who explores bisexuality while caring for her terminally-ill father.

The face of actress Ariane Labed lifts this quiet, dour character study by filmmaker Athina Rachel Tsangari.

Tsangari's art-house minimalism, which never lets us forget we're watching a movie, still permits a surprising degree of tender emotion.

Attenberg gets down in the emotional muck where life, death and sex intertwine. And like those life experiences, watching it can be both awkward and poignant.

Perpetually off-balance and maybe just a little too satisfied with its cynicism

The drama, at its core, is simple and conventional, but it has the aura of science fiction.

Tsangari distinguishes herself from her predecessor's freak-show formalism with an underlying humanism and freewheeling playfulness.

Sex, death, and an absurdist style come together in Greek film

The underlying idea is that life goes on whatever we do, that human beings are merely part (and not the most important one) of a larger ecological system involving the mineral, vegetable and animal world.

Fans of Dogtooth should certainly try this one out.

Impressively directed and superbly acted, Attenberg plays like a light-hearted, quirky version of Dogtooth, though its relative lack of plot means that it's difficult to engage with the characters on an emotional level.

Perhaps viewed under the influence of drugs or drink the film might spring to comic life, but taken straight it is far more likely to get on your nerves.

Attenberg, both jarring and sweet, stuttering and eloquent, doesn't deliver manifestos or offer answers. But, in its needling, idiosyncratic fashion, it's more fascinating than most films that do.

If you stay, hope to be charmed. But be warned: you could be exasperated first by the servings of self-regard and psycho-spiritual preciosity.