The Lost Son

With his Toronto-premiered feature debut Consequences (2018), Slovenian filmmaker Darko Štante enjoyed plenty of festival exposure by Slovenian standards. The reason for that might be a bit of a misunderstanding between the filmmaker on one side, and the festival programmers, audience and film critics on the other. Reportedly, Štante never intended to position Consequences as a piece of queer cinema, but to open the topic of the relationship between young men in the conditions of a prison-like isolation in reform homes for troubled youth. However, the label was hard to avoid, and for the greater part, it played out in the film’s favour.

So the expectations were quite high for his next feature that premiered recently at Sarajevo’s Open Air Premiere section. The choice of the premiere place and section of the festival raises certain doubts regarding whether The Lost Son will travel well afterwards. The doubts seem even greater, given that the trends do not favour male-driven stories on the topic of the trans-generational traumas and the relationships between fathers and sons.

The film’s hero is the police detective Andrej (Jure Henigman) who seems to lead a perfect life. He has a harmonious relationship with his spouse Anna (Lara Vouk), who works as an art curator, and also with his lesbian work partner Diana (Nika Rozman). At work, he is regarded as a sophisticated, modern cop with a plenty of knowledge in the field of psychology and human relations. But two cases are about to shake the very foundations of the life he has built for himself.

One of them is a domestic disturbance call that positions his estranged younger brother Kristian (Nejc Cijan Garlatti) as a perpetrator, and his wife Ksenija (Tamara Avguštin) and son David (Liam Benjamin Štante) as victims. When Andrej swipes the case under the rug, the opportunistic and volatile Kristian starts guilt-tripping him in order to use him as a shield for his criminal activities.

The other case involves a troubled teenager Žan (Svit Šturbej) who lives in fear of his strict, disciplinarian and even abusive father, but still acts out. Recognising the pattern from his own and Kristian’s upbringing with their own strict and abusive father (Igor Samobor), Andrej feels obliged to react before it is too late, but feels his hands are tied by the law. His internal conflicts will spill out and it will not be nice…

The filmmaker’s starting point is genre cinema, especially crime thriller, procedural and psychological drama until he zeroes in on the latter, using both the stress of police work and how broken family ties affect it as themes. The primary trouble stems from the filmmaker’s own script that needed a couple more hands and drafts before the shooting, which is particularly obvious when it comes to the motivations for characters’ certain actions. Those motivations seem both typical and jumpy at the same time, serving more to propel the story forward than to put the characters in relation to one another in an organic fashion.

The saving grace might lie in the fact that Štante is a better director than writer. The constant horizontal rotation in Peter Zeitlinger’s cinematography Štante insists on might not be everyone’s cup of tea, and the same goes for the acting of pretty much everyone involved early on in the film, but both of the signature moves turn out to serve the purpose once everything falls into place around the midpoint.

Regarding the actors, Henigman showcases the versatility and the leading man power as Andrej, Garlatti (over)plays Kristian as a pretty unhinged person, and the thespian Samobor dominates the one scene he has. The actresses do not fare that well, not as a result of their abilities, but due to a script that drafts their characters as stereotypical and largely passive.

Eventually, The Lost Son ends up as a mixed bag that serves as a portfolio of Štante’s technical abilities as a director, but shortcomings as a writer. With some more polishing in the scriptwriting stage, it could have worked as an old-school mix of a tense thriller and a moving psychological drama, but as is, it feels a bit rushed despite a relatively long amount of time spent in the making.

Reviewed on: 03 Sep 2026