Tantalizing if ultimately unsatisfying thriller by Austrian writer-director Götz Spielmann. An ex-convict employed as a custodian in a Viennese house of ill-repute is carrying on in secret a heartfelt affair with an immigrant Ukrainian sex worker deep in debt to the slave-driving owner. The ex-con, on a dutiful visit to his failing grandfather at a small farm in the country, next-door neighbor to a uniformed policeman and his wife, sizes up the local bank as an easy knockover, a fast exit from servitude. It all sets up nicely, and it develops unpredictably, and it unveils (so to speak) a surprise nonending. Feelings about this last are apt to be mixed. If we’re going to be dragged through a seedy sex club, past some stickup clichés (the girlfriend: “I have a bad feeling”; the boyfriend: “Nothing can go wrong”), and into a classic revenge scenario pitting two tortured men, cop and robber, in a game of cat-and-mouse, then we might not be prepared to ascend to the high-minded summit that Spielmann has in his sights. He must bear some culpability for our baser expectations. Johannes Krisch, Irina Potapenko, Ursula Strauss, Andreas Lust. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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