Fine Dead Girls

Fine Dead Girls is about Iva and Marija, a lesbian couple who move into a super weird apartment. Other tenants include a man who plays patriotic music all the time, a husband who pretends that his wife’s corpse is still alive, the friendly neighborhood abortionist and the landlady and her son who has a crush on Iva, unaware that she is not single and not straight.

The main tension in this film comes from the landlady learning that Iva and Marija are lesbians. This discovery takes the apartment setting from being just vaguely uncomfortable and odd to violent and deadly.

I am not qualified to review this film. I think it was successful in that apparently the apartment building is supposed to exist as a microcosm of Croatia and I get what they were doing there. There is a mixture of tradition and progression that clashes unevenly. Writer Mate Matišić and writer/director Dalibor Matanić definitely put a lot of thought and work into the specific mix of characters that would inhabit this fictional micro-Croatia. The mixture of the mundane and the over-the-top bizarre compliment each other really well to make both aspects look more extreme. It is an uncomfortable living situation for sure.

If the message that the film was trying to portray was that Croatia is uncomfortable and borderline surreal because of the division of progressive citizens and conservative citizens, then I guess it succeeded. I don’t know. I’m qualified to review lesbian content but the lesbian characters, like every other character in this film, function as a metaphor for something which I lack full understanding of.

Even disregarding the cultural metaphors that are lost on me, the film still works. Fine Dead Girls is one of those micro-budget art films that seem to exist to make you uncomfortable. Those films are ones I am additionally far from qualified to pass quality judgement on because I’ve no idea what makes them good. However, I know that Fine Dead Girls made me engaged and uncomfortable so I’m going to say mission accomplished. Overall, Fine Dead Girls is the best cinematic allegory for Croatia I have ever seen

Overall rating: 7.2/10

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