Gun-Shy

Lukas is a meals-on-wheels delivery man, new to the job and the city, a loner on a short fuse. Isabella is the girl who picks him up on a bus with a 'Help me' note, kicks off the (platonic) relationship with a confession about dildo preferences, mysteriously vacillates between come-ons and disappearances, and lures him into loving her. Unsurprisingly, they're both damaged souls - indeed, right from the opening credits, everything in this film is dismally predictable, notwithstanding a raft of implausible characters, narrative details and scraps of 'colour'. Ludicrously contrived and clichéd, it even sometimes seems like an extraordinarily absurdist black comedy; in fact, however, it's suggestive of a remake of Taxi Driver by someone who's only half-ingested what the New Austrian Cinema has to offer. (From a novel by Dirk Kurbjuweit.