Pray
2012 · 17m · Greece
Directed by Thelyia Petraki
Genres: dark comedy, drama, surrealism
Tones: absurdist, dark, provocative
A girl is sentenced by a court of law to be buried alive — and no one around her seems to care.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
A girl gets a death sentence and the world shrugs — it's absurdist provocation without apology, the kind of premise that makes you sit in the discomfort instead of looking away, and Petraki refuses to sentimentalize it into something palatable.
Petraki's formal control here is surgical: the deadpan tonal register, the measured framing of bureaucratic horror—it's working in a lineage of dark allegory from Kafkaesque theater, but the restraint is what allows the surrealism to breathe rather than shout.
The entire film pivots on the decision to keep the performances utterly flat, treating a grotesque premise with documentary-level composure—that single tonal choice transforms what could be cheap provocation into something genuinely unsettling and strange.