The Hollywood Reporter – Jonathan Holland

A Blast, Syllas Tzoumerkas’s second film, is the frantic, unsettling and intriguing record of a woman’s journey, a journey more emotional than literal. The watching viewer is strapped in beside her, along for the ride, hair blown back. (…) ‘I ‘ve lived a ridiculous life’: an insight of a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown, forced by crisis into a full-scale reappraisal of things. This is the pain at the heart of Angeliki Papoulia’s dangerously committed, exposed performance, and it’s the brave exposure of this pain which, against the odds, permits the viewer to sympathize with a woman who has chosen to abandon her children. Though her character is not having a blast, it looks exactly as though Papoulia is. (…) It is all shot by D.P. Pantelis Mantzanas with captivating energy and brio, cutting furiously back between past and present via Kathrin Dietzel’s via sharp, seamless editing, as it renders Maria’s furious, unfocused energy and mood swings, and becoming blindingly high-speed over the final fifteen minutes. (…) A black, bleak, urgently contemporary film, as a whole, A Blast is just that: Syllas Tzoumerkas’ charged personal diatribe against an economic system seemingly designed first to make people, and then to break them. Read more →