It’s hard to rate a film as bleak as this one as either (Not)/Worth Consuming/Wishy Washy. It’s about the sheer awfulness of life at the sharp end of capitalism. It’s a landscape of McJobs, flexible, precarious labour, mental and physical exploitation and a sense of disintegration and apathy that brutally victimises everybody.

There are no endearing characters in the film, it’s about how people survive in environments that deny humanity. We follow the day to day lives of two characters one, a male security guard and then a bubble gum machine mover, and the other a female nurse and then a cleaner after a brief period as a sex worker. Endless shots of horrible Ukrainian housing estates and Viennese institutions, create a world that is continually cold, windswept and grey.

As a viewer you get dragged down with the characters – it’s a shocking film because nearly all transactions have been reduced to monetary value, including any sort of intimacy. (The use of nudity in the film is truly upsetting; which of course is the point). People are either trying to get or trying to spend money, everything has been reduced to the free market limit, which means nobody has responsibility for anything other then themselves. Consequently, everybody in this world is an object with no inner life.

The film ends on the word “Death” and it leaves you filled with a joylessness that takes some time to shake off. In this sense the film is worth seeing because it’s so rare (for a film that’s fictional allbeit shot in a documentary style) to feel so terrible afterwards. On the other hand, it could be argued that life is too short to subject yourself to a two and a quarter hour gloomfest. Either way, this is some film that’s been made and I wonder what drove the director to make it?