Synopsis

Georg, played by the director himself, has been a music critic at the newspaper Express for the past 25 years, until one day, he is given notice. His objection “There will be an outcry” is handled by his – obviously German – boss, harshly saying “I don’t think so. Most of your readers are dead.” Georg spirals down into a deep crisis, exacerbated by his wife Johanna, a moderately successful psychotherapist, who, unlike Georg, really wants to have a child. Georg keeps the fact that he has been fired from her and spends his days in the Viennese amusement park “Prater” reading the newspaper. There, he meets his former schoolmate Erich, who plans on renovating and re-operating the well-known old rollercoaster “Wild Mouse”. Erich has a Romanian girlfriend with whom he cannot really communicate since she doesn’t speak German and he doesn’t speak English nor Romanian. Aimlessly, Georg agrees to a business partnership with Erich. Meanwhile, he plies his ex-boss with worse and worse acts of vandalism. His actions don’t make him any happier, but at least he gets in touch with a clever policeman. Finally, frustration and desperation culminate in a great sequence in the countryside which one can certainly call the quintessence of Hader-esque tragicomedy.