Kelemen announced his arrival on the arthouse circuit with Fate and Frost, and continues in the same offbeat vein with this almost nihilistic study of social alienation and emotional inertia. Rendered near catatonic by his dead-end existence, Anton (Michael) finally exhausts the patience of his love-starved partner. As Leni (Jasch) resorts to prostitution in a bar, Anton wanders the streets, drifting from an encounter with a bellmaker to the paedophile auction of a young girl.
Such is the enigmatic vacuity of the performances and the compartmentalisation of the incidents that it's hard to grasp what Kelemen wants us to derive from his film, apart from a dispiriting lesson in the depravity of which humans are capable. Clearly, misery is also in the eye of the beholder.