Looked at separately none of these four interwoven stories of suburbia are anything special - a surgeon (he of the heart transplant) (Jakob Ecklund) has a long standing affair with the wife of his colleague; a handyman (Magnus Krepper) spends too long out at work to make money for his family when all they want is his presence; an elderly couple live a life of bizarre isolation after a family tragedy; a divorced wife Anita (Ann Petren) still cannot accept her husband's new marriage to a younger woman and her life has turned to crime and madness.

The touching together of the individual stories is a bit random, and I particularly found the resolution of the handyman's tale a little forced. But the strength of the film is in the performances and the intensity of the camerawork - grey unglamorous faces with all the irregularities of real people in the real painful world, shot in unflinching close-up and unflattering light. Ann Petren as Anita is particularly striking - she even seems to grow older or younger according to her emotions.

One does feel queasy about humanity and its enormous propensity for betrayal. But the problem for me with the film is that such a wall of misery is built up that I wasn't convinced by the  'good enough' resolutions at the end. Runge had done such a convincing job with the bleakness that I didn't believe daybreak would come, the sun would rise, and everything would be bearable. Rather than acceptance and sunrise over the docks, I would have preferred the final image of the film to be the brilliant earlier one of two cars chasing each other forever around a grey muddy car park, pursuer and pursued becoming indistinguishable, bound not to each other but to the pattern they had set for themselves.

Seen at Sunderland Film Festival, Cineworld, Sunderland January 2005