Director: Ulrich Seidl
Year Released: 2007
Rating: 2.5
A nurse leaves her native Ukraine to start a new life in Austria while an Austrian security guard travels to the Ukraine to improve himself. Seidl's admitted he wants his audience to have a 'reaction' to his pictures, and with his displays of graphic sexuality and physical and emotional abuse it would be hard not to, however his work as a sensationalist/moralist has been shaky up to this point in time: clearly we're supposed to be disgusted by the degradation of a prostitute - forced to walk around a hotel room like a dog - and cringe at the sight of the elderly in a hospital defecating all over themselves and gasping for breath ... but what of it? As a filmmaker he's gotten more confident, but the intellect still lacks: he provides no real solution or cure - he wants you to stare at his Hall of Horrors and be saddened and sickened, but can't offer any way out. In the end, his protagonists are just as low down as they were in the beginning of the story, and his elderly patients in the hospital aren't improving, and the teenage prostitutes will continue to be ruined. If all he can do is sigh, what does he expect from his audience?
