Daniel Hoesl’s striking but inscrutable debut feature is an absurdist redesign of Chantal Akerman’s feminist still life, down to the unexplained title. Dreyer and Godard are also explicitly name-checked in this deadpan study of a bourgeois Viennese housewife abandoning material living in the face of economic recession, though Ulrich Seidl, on whose Paradise trilogy Hoesl was an assistant director, is a clearer aesthetic influence.

A dryly funny pre-credits sequence follows unflappable fortysomething Fanni (a committed Johanna Orsini-Rosenberg) as she buys a designer dress at great expense, only to toss it straight into the nearest recycling bin. That sets the pace, tonally and thematically, for her ensuing adventures, as she is evicted from her plush, rent-overdue apartment, literally burns her remaining assets and takes a job on a rural piggery, where she finds a kindred spirit in rebellious farmhand Anna (Christina Reichsthaler). Any allegorical interpretations are as open-ended as Bettina Koester’s slamming techno-pop score is emphatic.

Guy Lodge
Variety

Winner, Best Feature, International Film Festival Rotterdam
Special Mention, Krakow Independent Film Festival Off Camera