Fate

The title is grimly apt: Fred Kelemen's is a stark, singular, often oppressively determined cinema. Susan Sontag, among others, has lauded the film as a rare example of modern visionary film-making, comparing the director with the likes of Alexandr Sokurov. Fate is a vision of a mittel-European neo-Dark Age - a life of filth, squalor and desperation, cheaply blown up from video, giving it the same corrupted, grimy hue Thomas Vinterberg exploited for Festen's dark night of the soul. Here, though, without any allusive or reflective wherewithal, the stripped down, unremittingly bleak narrative - following first a man, then his woman, through a nocturnal waste of alcoholic and sexual violence and alienation - seems just so much tendentious angst, hollow high-browbeating from a Pained Artist.