VICTORIAN PREMIERE

Set in an unsettlingly flaky near-future, Cristina Groșan’s second feature premiered at the 79th Venice Film Festival, winning the ‘Best Director Under 40’ award. Taking the tropes of science-fiction and soap-drama, the movie sets its story within the individual tales of three different characters: a misfit teenager, an anxious mother and a recent widow. Combining what we think about Tomorrow with present day ennui, Groșan’s Ordinary Failures offers us an imaginative and stylised story that is visually alluring and strangely kitsch, but its greatest strength lies in the people, who remain spectacularly real until the bitter end.