Feed Me With Your Words | Review

Holy Strokes!: Turk’s Debut Loses Its Appetite

Born out of a collaboration with the Torino Film Lab comes Martin Turk’s feature directorial debut, Feed Me With Your Words, a three tiered narrative structure told from thee separate points of view from an overlapping timeline. Turk, who has worked as assistant director to Danis Tanovic and Maja Weiss, shows an intriguing knack for establishing a broody foreboding, but his overlapping ellipses lead to an underwhelming conclusion that feels disappointingly contrived.

On a seemingly normal day, Matej (Sebastian Cavazza) suddenly begins receiving phone calls from his estranged father, Janez (Boris Cavazza) whom he hasn’t spoken with in over a decade. Reluctantly, he finally answers his phone and finds that his younger brother Robert, who had been living with his parents in the Slovenian countryside, had recently traveled to Turin and has seemingly disappeared. Janez needs Matej’s help because wife and mother Irina’s (Miranda Caharija) mental illness necessitates that she not be left alone.

Obviously still upset about the unmentioned circumstances which resulted in their estrangement, Matej packs up wife Ana (Masa Derganc) and prepubescent daughter Veronika (Iza Veselko) to drop them off to watch Irina at his childhood home while they search for Robert in Turin. As they bicker their way through the tangled details of Robert’s whereabouts, who had gone to Italy as a graphologist attempting to discover the handwriting of Jesus Christ, we also are treated to the tense atmosphere that develops between Ana and the mother-in-law that can’t seem to remember who this strange woman is in her home. However, Irina quickly bonds with Veronika, who suddenly develops a troubling change in attitude and treatment of her mother. Finally, we catch a glimpse into Robert’s storyline, his actions matching up with previously mentioned details until all strands and vantage points converge.

Divided into three distinct parts (all seeming to indicate we will get a lot more information than we really do—Searching the Past; Losing the Present; Finding the Future) there’s a certain ominous atmosphere that could very well indicate something terrifying, horrific, or even tragic about to transpire. The conflicted father and son dynamic (played by a real pair), which is never quite explained, starts off with a tension that never manages to simmer, then dips back into a more interesting scenario between mother and daughter-in-law back at the rural house.

Mental illness and potential nervous breakdowns quickly make this a compelling and interesting conversation piece—is the old country driving the family insane? Are the sins of the past still feeding the dour present? We’ll never know, because next we get a peek at just what Robert was up to in Turin, namely that he discovers a bum who not only shares the same handwriting as Christ but heals a dog that gets hit by a car with his bare hands. In the end, it seems that an obnoxious amount of unrelated circumstances have been dictated by the heavens to make one dysfunctional family perhaps examine its serious issues. But if that’s really all that’s going on, why should we care? Turk never gives us any meaty details about the source conflict, and those easily annoyed by possible insidiously espoused religious views (that may as well be preternatural for the sake of this film), will most likely find Feed Me With Your Words to be an anemic source of pleasure.

Reviewed on April 15 at the 2013 Disappearing Act European Film Festival.