One evening, the pregnant mother of Mathias, age 7, doesn’t come to pick him up as scheduled after one of his friends’ birthday parties. He is escorted home, where he finds out she was beaten up by her husband. Taken to the hospital with his mother, the two then find refuge in a battered women’s shelter. From there the two, both terrorized by these events, try to find a safe haven away from violence.

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In the first scenes, Diego Lerman leaves the audience as lost as Mathias: abandoned for seemingly no reason, then forced into an unknown environment. This point of view runs through the whole film, which was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight in Cannes, with the camera staying close to the child, while his father is only a voice on the phone or a threat that is blurry or off-camera. At first captivating, this approach soon becomes all too predictable, with the exception of a few good scenes, such as when Mathias meets a little girl who is also a victim of the adult world. At the end of the movie, when the capricious boy becomes a small adult against his will, Refugiado leaves the disagreeable impression of offering nothing new on a subject that is deserving of so much more.