Unrelated
NYT Critic's Picks • 1h 36m
Joanna Hogg • United Kingdom • 2007 • An exacting eye on the discontents of the British upper class.
Anna arrives at a stately villa in Tuscany to visit her longtime friend, Verena. Her husband, Alex, has canceled at the last minute, a minor inconvenience that irritates Verena nonetheless. Though the official excuse for his absence is professional, it is clear that Anna and Alex have quarreled—seeking a reprieve from her domestic troubles, Anna spends more and more time with the villa’s teenage contingent, who drink and smoke and disdainfully refer to their parents as “the olds.” The hints of a romance with Verena’s nephew Oakley destabilizes Anna’s position in the villa’s fragile hierarchy.
Captured with immersive sound design and a studied detachment, Unrelated casts an exacting, ambivalent eye on the discontents of the British upper class. Joanna Hogg’s directorial debut premiered at Locarno, Telluride, Thessaloniki and BFI London, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize. Unrelated is a New York Times Critic's Pick.
Up Next in NYT Critic's Picks
-
Up the Yangtze
Yung Chang • China • 2008 • A human dimension to the wrenching changes facing humanity.
The Three Gorges Dam, once completed, will be the largest hydroelectric project in the world. It also requires blocking the Yangtze, an enormous river that runs through the heart of China, and upon whose shor...
-
Violette
Martin Provost • 2013 • France
A portrait of writer Violette LeDuc, protégé of Simone de Beauvoir.
Born the illegitimate daughter of a housemaid, Violette too is determined to write, and out of both talent and pers...
-
What Will People Say
Iram Haq • 2017 • Norway • Nisha is sent to live in a small village 200 miles from Islamabad.
Sixteen year-old Nisha lives in Oslo. At home, she adheres to the conservative values of her Pakistani family...
