Klopka / The Trap

The Belgrade couple’s child is gravely ill, an operation in distant Berlin the only chance of survival. Construction worker Mladen and his wife have no way of raising the necessary sum of 30,000 euros; the friends and relatives they approach are unable – or unwilling – to help. After placing a small ad in a newspaper as a last resort, the father is offered a deal: he can earn the cash by killing an “enemy of the people”... Mladen declines. The child’s condition deteriorates. The desperate father Mladen changes his mind – but his wife must never know. And so begins a family’s end: the father powerless, caught in a trap, aware that every step is taking him closer to the abyss. He ultimately obtains release, but pays a high price. KLOPKA presents the psychogram of a society in which murder is seemingly a solution slightly less preposterous than elsewhere. The film focuses not on war and brutality, however, but rather on the mental landscape, on the damaged souls of the population. Pathos is kept at bay by the clarity of the colours, by the controlled distance of the shots, by the serene narrative cadence. Eight years after the bombardment of Belgrade, the condition of Serbia is revealed as viscerally as the innards of a corpse on the dissecting table: the construction workers hoping against hope that their firm will find a buyer, the slick war profiteers cruising along the pitted roads in their cushioned status symbols, and a middle class disintegrating into poverty at one end, new money on the other – a vacuum at the heart of society.