When mom finally returns home, her face is covered in bandages - but why? The ten-year-old twins have doubts about the identity of this woman: this is not their mom, which is why they don't obey her. Whereupon she tries to gain their respect with naked violence ... But why does only one of the two boys ever speak? What's really going on here?
The feature film debut of Severin Fiala & Veronika Franz (Ulrich Seidl's long-time artistic accomplice) looks like a late-modern mixture of Georges Franju and Lucio Fulci: the former provides the somnambulistic, brightly aged basic tone of this masterpiece of disquiet, while the latter provides its pulpy peaks, the desire for excess, for a lyricism of precisely placed splatter shocks. It deals with questions that are usually avoided: what are love and trust built on, what do we do to each other out of disappointment and despair, what boundaries are we willing to cross? Note the stuffed donkeys in the children's bunk bed: they are relatives of Bresson's Balthazar as well as the nameless gray animal carcass from Buñuel's Un chien andalou (1929).
