Death and new life, cultural prejudices and that Swiss obsession with money play into a film that is Germanic in its darkness, as subtle as a wet slap and funny? Eventually.
Oberli and Ziesche, who’ve divided the story into three chapters plus an epilogue (the less said about the plot the better to protect a few solid twists), attempt to lay bare the thorny issue of outsourcing care work to migrants but don’t layer in enough heft or context to make a wholly satisfying statement.
The film, written by Oberli and Cooky Ziesche, satirizes class divides and xenophobia (“the Pole” constantly carries a derogatory connotation here), but never takes the satire far enough to be memorable, challenging or anything beyond whimsical.
Bettina Oberli is more interested in the interplay of her characters than a barbed look at geopolitics, an approach that clicks only to a point in this well-performed but overlong and uneven feature.