I couldn’t find an official English title for this, but if I had to give a translation, I wouldn’t really be sure what would be the best way to go, because the word ‘taito’ can have very different connotations. It could be ‘The Art of Screaming’ or ‘The Ability to Scream’, but the most precise would probably be ‘The Faculty to Scream’, but that might be a bit clumsy. I don’t know. Not my field, really.

The premise here is great: A therapist has a patient and the patient is having compulsive violent thoughts about her partners. Like very violet. Then, as the therapist is spending time at her summer cottage with some friends, her son turns up with this patient and introduces her as his girlfriend.

As I said, a great premise. Our therapist can’t talk about her discussions with the patient because of confidentiality, but of course she would like to protect her son, which leads to tension. What can she do?

However… So, I read this article from a psychologist recently. It wasn’t exactly a recent article, as it was from the late 2010s (I think), but the basic message was that no-one is emotionally balanced. We are all messed up in our own ways. There are no normal people. The movie captures this nicely. All five people at the (pretty big) cottage are fucked up, but they function.

The problem is that we don’t really get what’s going on. This can be good or bad. Sometimes not knowing can lead to very satisfactory reveals and sometimes knowing can lead to interesting tension of how are we going to get there, but it’s easy to fail on these. And this movie is right there on the cusp of failing or not. Maybe another watch would make it clearer, but movies shouldn’t require multiple viewings for this.

My official, very important final take on this movie: It’s a decent attempt for a first feature, but there are problems in both the script and the direction. However, there is potential here. It is an interesting movie despite it’s flaws and I would definitely be interested in seeing more work from the director.