Miss Violence

As the title suggests, this modern-day Greek tragedy - whose opening scene coolly depicts the apparent suicide of an 11-year-old girl at her own birthday party - doesn't pull its punches. Its grim tension comes from the unravelling of the mystery behind the girl's untimely death and its effect on her dysfunctional family. This comprises an unnamed patriarch, mother, adult daughter and three surviving children, whose cramped living arrangements make a mockery of privacy and breed a claustrophobic sense of menace. Writer/director Alexandros Avranas's chilly precision follows the lead of the so-called "Weird Wave" of Greek art house cinema (sparked by Yorgos Lanthimos's excellent Dogtooth in 2009), although as the unsurprisingly ugly truth emerges, he pulls back the curtain to reveal brutal, explicit scenes that owe more to the nightmarish extremes of X-rated horror. Viscerally intense but far from subtle, it's an approach many will find gratuitously shocking, but others will see as boldly unflinching.