‘Victim’ Review: A Mother’s Love and a Son’s Lie Expose a Community Corroded by Hate and Politics

variety.com:

Jessica Kiang It isn’t that people’s first instincts are bad in “Victim,” Slovak director Michal Blaško’s compelling, apprehensive feature debut.

A distraught Ukrainian mother travelling back to her adopted home in the Czech Republic to be by her injured son’s hospital bedside, for example, will find someone willing to drive her when her bus is delayed.

It’s just that once they find those instincts lining up with their pre-existing prejudices — say, when the boy alleges, or heavily implies, that the ones who beat him up were of Roma background — then those same people will erase all nuance, ignore all complexity, and do almost anything to drink further into the intoxication of righteous moral outrage.

Even if it means shoring up a teenager’s lie. The mother is Irina (a sympathetic, stressed Vita Smachelyuk), a hardworking housekeeper who aspires to open a hairdressing salon with her friend Sveta (Inna Zhulina), and who is re-applying for Czech citizenship — having lost out the last time on a technicality.