"Uncle" (2022) is a debut film by directors David Kapac and Andrija Mardešić, which has won several awards, including the Best Screenplay Award at the Pula Film Festival in 2022.

It's a psychological thriller that exemplifies how simplicity of plot doesn't have to be reductive in symbolic representation. The story revolves around the Family (Ivana Roščić, Goran Bogdan, and Roko Sikavica), welcoming Uncle (Predrag Miki Manojlović) from Germany to celebrate Christmas together, revealing room for manipulation with these motifs. Kapac and Mardešić took a typical family holiday, deconstructed it, and pieced it back together repeatedly, a nightmare with no end in sight.

From the first scene, it's clear that something is amiss. The mother, stressed about finishing lunch, breaks a plate, and in a close-up, her foot in a stocking with a hole in the toe slowly pulls the plate shards towards her. The family steps outside to greet Uncle, who parks his car on the bright green lawn under the scorching sun. The viewer feels a sense of astonishment and unease. The setting appears to be in the eighties judging by the attire of the main characters (for which the Father remarks, "there's nothing like clothes from Trieste"), the bulky television, the revelation of a video recorder (brought from Germany, of course), and a tightly bound photo album with decorative paper in front of each picture. However, in the midst of lunch, Uncle's phone rings, the familiar iPhone sound filling the room, and the artificial Christmas cheer dissipates like the atmosphere in a theater when a phone rings in the audience. The absurdity, unease, and grotesqueness permeating the stale air of the house where time stands still mostly stem from the dissonance between what is said and what is seen, a testament to the excellent screenplay. Uncle eagerly welcomes the raw turkey, claiming he had been thinking about it the whole way from Munich. With the question "Have you grown hair on your balls?" repeatedly directed at the Son, a grown man, Uncle humiliates and infantilizes him. The mother, with an expressionless face, sings Magazin's song "Dva zrna grožđa" before bedtime to two grown men, one assigned the role of a boy and the other sadistically directing this whole performance.

Everything in this film is staged and unnatural. The Mother sticks her sentences that she must say around the house to remember them, and the Father steps in for the Son who is late for lunch, delivering his lines. The Christmas celebration is actually a performance in which the characters Father, Mother, Son, and Uncle are both actors and audience to each other. With a style of acting belonging to theater rather than film, the actors deliver their lines exaggeratedly and somewhat unnaturally, yet it does not detract from the cinematic effect. On the contrary, it emphasizes what is said and why it is said in such a manner. While the acting is theatrical, the stylistic effects are distinctly cinematic, with the camera seeming like a separate character that dares not approach the others, mostly hiding behind furniture or showing the characters from high or low angles, following them like a fly on the wall that has caught a whiff of decay and has come to indulge in it. The anxiety also arises from the nauseating repetition of the same day over and over, creating a whirlwind of unrest - why does the Family agree to perform this play again and again?

In the context of regional cinematography, this film is a completely new dish on the menu that can introduce the audience to new flavors. The directors boldly play with the genre, blending theatrical conventions with cinematic means of expression. With another daring fusion - the most traditional Christian holiday with horror and dread - the directors provoke discomfort in the viewers. Holiday fatigue, uncomfortable encounters with relatives, and various family dynamics are portrayed in a way that is harder to digest if you don't have the stomach for it. Those with a good stomach will lick their fingers after the film as if after a real festive feast.