Parents' Guide to

A Perfect Day

By Jeffrey Anderson, Common Sense Media Reviewer

age 16+

Edgy drama follows aid workers in Balkan war zone.

Movie R 2016 106 minutes
A Perfect Day Poster Image

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What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

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What's the Story?

In the Balkans in 1995, a group of aid workers -- including Mambru (Benicio Del Toro), "B" (Tim Robbins), and Sophie (Melanie Thierry) -- do their best to pitch in. Local translator Damir (Fedja Stukan) helps. Today's task is to remove a grossly overweight corpse from a village well, but when their old rope breaks, they embark upon what turns into a day-long odyssey around the country in an attempt to finish the job. To complicate matters, Mambru's ex-lover, Katya (Olga Kurylenko), joins the group -- and they also rescue a young boy, Nikola (Eldar Residovic), from a band of gun-wielding teens. Things come to a head when, just before dark, they come upon a trap -- possible land mines -- in the road. Can this perfect day get any worse?

Is It Any Good?

Our review:
Parents say: Not yet rated
Kids say: Not yet rated

This low-key drama is at its best when it paints a picture of a specific place and time and a culture of expats at work; it avoids overt hysteria as well as punishing horrors-of-war messages. A PERFECT DAY isn't necessarily a great movie -- there's not much at stake, humor is sparse, and it can't help feeling a little heavy from time to time -- but thanks to its compressed time frame (just 24 hours) and the cast's strong performances, it's quite interesting.

Spanish director Fernando León de Aranoa (Mondays in the Sun) gives us a snapshot of a certain kind of person, a kind of misfit who doesn't like going home -- or even having a home. The job is horrible, dangerous, and perhaps not even that rewarding, but there's still an odd kind of exotic allure to it. More than the horrors of war or the politics of war, it's this job, and these characters, that make the movie work.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

  • Families can talk about A Perfect Day's violence. How does it depict the horrors of war without showing graphic bloodshed and gore? How does it use violence to suggest things?

  • What is an aid worker? What appear to be the pros and cons of this particular job? Does it look appealing?

  • How did you feel about the teen boy with the gun?

  • Why is the "B" character so preoccupied with sex? What does sex mean to him?

Movie Details

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