As chilly as its remote, snow-drenched setting, this German crime-comedy mixes gore, very dry humor and a litany of seemingly random plot twists into a frequently languid genre piece. Following a botched job, hit man Walter (Jürgen Ribmann) takes a mysterious gig in the wilds of the Carpathian Mountains. Along the way, our stoical antihero encounters a gallery of oddballs, including the boss’s pill-popping wife (Eva-Katrin Hermann), who accidentally shoots herself to death during drug-fueled extramarital sex. The tone here is unhurried and the bursts of violence and narrative played at an aesthetic remove, but the cycles of languor and activity ultimately feel too calculated—the strained overlay of sensationalism onto a desiccated canvas.
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