Mladen, an ordinary man, signs a pact with the devil in order to pay for the life-saving operation for his son and becomes a murderer. But the act soon starts to haunt him: keeping the secret from his wife forces him into a kind of emotional poker, and his conscience does not cooperate very long in his betrayal of his own moral standards. A “Balkan version of Crime and Punishment”, wrote director Srdan Golubović, set against the backdrop of a transition process gone awry: “a modern ‘film noir’ about post-Milosevic Serbia, where there is no more war, just a moral and existential desert.” Golubović vividly dissects personality transformations from the perspective of a confession, always showing great respect for his protagonists. With its distinctive language of images, which finds a style of its own between close-ups and the representation of urban architecture, the film reveals an artistic approach to the theme that points beyond empty metaphors to the personal quality of the story — a story whose pull can’t be resisted.
(Berlinale Catalogue)
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