Patrick Martin said:From the very beginning, I have been looking to Ciljati her specific ambitions in that regard.
In some sense, she is simply bound by Determinator's design.
You are aiming for her ambition, whereas my goal is to point out that this supposed "ambition" isn't actually articulated; it’s more like a frantic delusion that lacks any sense of direction or purpose. An ambition has to be an aspiration toward something specific. It can't just hang there, undefined, which is exactly what we have here. Freedom requires a definition—a person has to actually know what they want, even if they are an inexperienced person like Julia. But if this same Julia is already raising questions, if she is rebelling against her father, God, tradition, family, duty, the very earth beneath her feet, and her homeland, then that rebellion is utterly senseless if it doesn't have a destination. And honestly, that is exactly how it was handled in the film: a gritty, bottom-of-the-barrel ending on par with Zafranović's Schwarz Hund—an endless end, a conclusion devoid of clear meaning. You see Julia babbling aimlessly in the Mediterranean Sea, drifting somewhere, but where? That part is missing.
Of course I can't appreciate that; I am far too principled and set in my ways, a true patriarch at heart. You might be able to find value in it, but you strike me as someone lacking any real backbone—some sort of secondary figure, perhaps a mere shadow of Julia's forged father. He is just like Julia; neither of them has a single clue what they actually want. They can't decide if they want to stand as leaders or if they’d rather just sell off the family estate to a bunch of fast-talking frauds who talk a big game only to end up making a mess of everything.
You really have to sit with this idea: Julia is essentially "determined"—fixed in place by her father, by God, by stone, and by tradition—and now she’s supposedly trying to break free, to bloom. But she has no idea how, and she lacks any real sense of direction. It would be one thing if this were just a snapshot of life, a realistic glimpse into the confusion of young women trying to find their footing in a world that demands they decide who they are before they're ready. But we aren't watching a documentary; this is a film. As a piece of cinema, it needs to function as a complete, cohesive whole that offers some semblance of meaning in place of Julia's disorientation. Yet, it fails to do that. The movie simply ends exactly where it began, with Julia out in the Atlantic, drifting somewhere. After all that rebellion against her father, only to end up stranded on dry land next to some stranger on a white yacht, she ultimately circles back to her starting point without having moved an inch. The film remains silent on what she actually gains from the ordeal, leaving us with an ending that feels aimless and hollow—just a restless, purposeless wandering in the sea.
The father is portrayed with this frustrating lack of clarity; he’s simultaneously a traditional patriarch and some sort of hollowed-out fraud, playing the part of a world-class waiter just to please people. He ends up humiliating himself in front of some obnoxious foreigner, leaving his entire character completely undefined. It’s the same issue with the movie Murina itself—it lacks a cohesive sense of purpose, which brings me back to my original point: the whole thing just isn't transparent.
The film Murina would have easily jumped ten points if it had just possessed a clearly articulated core message—something along the lines of: sacred things are not for sale.
The footage lacks any real sense of clarity; sure, there are certain elements drifting through the frame, but they feel entirely disjointed. It’s all just a muddled, foggy mess that lands more as a joke than anything substantial.
I can’t help but wonder what the ocean would sound like to my son if we weren't stuck in this place. If we were actually going somewhere, we would have had to lean into that tired cinematic trope—producing some supposedly "genius" epic about ancestral stones and ancient genes, all designed to mock the shallow outsiders while painting the father figure as some terrifying, mythic hero. Or, we could have taken the other route entirely: just let Julia go. Let her head off to Harvard, become some high-flying fraud, and live out her life as a fake globetrotter on a yacht, only to eventually sail back home and sell nothing but smoke and mirrors to those people obsessed with their own supposed heritage—people foolish enough to swallow those fairy tales.
The film reaches its peak when Julia opens a window from the darkness where she’s been trapped, signaling her supposed liberation while the anthem of the Queen of Heaven echoes through the scene. It sets up this grand procession standing in stark contrast to the small-time hustlers loitering around a party that’s meant to facilitate some shady land deal. However, the cinematic strength of the Queen of Heaven and that tension between the formal procession and the grubby festivities isn't fully realized; it remains nothing more than a fleeting moment lost in a sea of aimless grumbling and trivial nonsense.
