The Enemy Within

Revenge is a recurrent theme in thrillers usually dispensed by action heroes with a wellstocked arsenal But in Yorgos Tsemberopouloss nuanced moral maze the protagonist is the bookish Kostas Manolis Mavromatakis a suburban florist well versed in social and political theory which he discusses at length with a local publican But when his home is invaded by masked hoodlums who bind his family and rape his teenage daughter our everyman hero finds his intellectual stance untenable Encouraged by his paranoid militarist neighbour Kostas decides to take the law into his own hands and in doing so begins to understand for the first time the world he has been living in The vigilante movie is a wellexplored genre too but Tsemberopoulos gives it a whole new urgency subverting the cliched rightwing fantasy structure and seeing it through the eyes of a man who comes to find his real self while trying to live up to the imagined expectations of others Source LFF programme