Klopka - Die Falle

The Trap

In order to pay for a life-saving operation for his son, a quite normal man signs a pact with the devil and becomes a solitary murderer. The deed soon starts hounding Mladen: keeping the secret from his wife forces him into a kind of emotional poker, and his conscience also doesn′t cooperate very long in this betrayal of his own moral standards. A "Balkan version of ′Crime and Punishment′", as director Srdan Golubović writes, set against the backdrop of a transition process gone awry: "a modern ′film noir′ about post-Milošević Serbia, where there is no more war, just a moral and existential desert."

Golubović vividly dissects the personality transformations from the perspective of a confession, always showing great respect for his protagonists. With its distinctive language of images, which finds a style of its own between close-ups and the representation of urban architecture, the film reveals an artistic approach to the theme that points beyond empty metaphors at the personal quality of the story – a story whose pull can′t be refused.

Bernd Buder

Source: 57. Internationale Filmfestspiele Berlin (Catalogue)