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Thomas (Merab Ninidze) has invited his best friends from way back,
Heinrich (Andreas Lust) and Eva (Ursina Lardi), to spend a weekend with
him and his wife Sonja (Dorka Gryllus) at their new idyllic house at Lake
Neusiedel. At first, the reunion seems to prove a big success, but soon a
dark shadow arises: Several kids have disappeared in the neighbourhood,
and a snuff video has popped up on the internet that might show what has
happened to the kids - a snuff video that Heinrich eventually admits to
have seen. For some reason, neighbour Imre (Oszkár Nyári) soon starts
to suspect Heinrich to be the killer, and obviously his suspicions are
detailed enough for the police to bring Heinrich in to question him, and
even after they release him they forbid him to leave the region. Now that
puts quite a bit of strain on our four re-uniting friends, and eventually,
rifts in their respective relationships start to show and deepen ... until
the killer is found, after which everything turns back to being nice and
dandy, the four spend one last peaceful day together, then Heinrich and
Eva return to the city - where Heinrich is soon visited by two cops, who
want to question him about ... Thomas. Meanwhile, Sonja sees on the TV
that the man who was supposed to be the killer of the kids was only a fake
desperate for attention, and now the search for the killer is on again -
and she finds more and more evidence pointing to Thomas as the killer ... To
some extent, this film plays exactly like most novels by Thomas Glavinic
(writer of the source material) read: There are some great scenes here,
scenes of suspense, tension and whatnot, and somehow the build-up of the
mystery as such is quite nicely done ... but on a narrative level, the
film quite simply sucks. The whole film takes forever to take the audience
to a point of interest, many narrative threads are dropped without any
explanation, complex conflicts are just written out of the film without
rhyme or reason at random moments, and the film fails to give us a proper
pay-off. As I said, all of this perfectly corresponds with Glavinic's way
of writing. But the film has problems of its own as well, like its cold,
almost impersonal directorial style, its inability to properly develop its
characters, and its mostly completely empty dialogue coupled with many a
banal scene. Granted, wtih a massive re-write this could have become a
good movie, but as it is, it is not the worst film ever, but something
that leaves a lot to be desired.
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