Breathing

Roman interviews for a metal-working job and lies about his welding skills to the foreman. When the foreman attempts to place a welder's mask on his face, he recoils with a stifled scream, revealing a buried trauma. Walter Fakler, his probation counselor, arrives to fetch him after the disastrous attempt and returns him to prison with instructions to check the want ads.

Back in prison, Roman endures the ritualized strip search upon re-entry, performed with curt efficiency by a guard and his assistant. The procedure recurs later in the film with subtle dialogue changes, underscoring the routine that constrains him. The day ends with him alone in his cell as the heavy doors clang shut.

A rare moment of recreation shows Roman at an indoor swimming pool with the other juvenile prisoners. He dives in and swims laps, largely ignored by the others, highlighting his isolation within the system. The scene recurs later with variations to emphasize his distance from the others.

He commutes by train into Vienna for his mortuary work, a crucial qualification for parole. Along the route, a roadside advertisement depicts a South Seas paradise and reads Dive Into Adventure, hinting at his future dreams. The routine and the ad together begin to awaken small shifts in his hardened exterior.

Roman arrives at Bestattung Wien and is initially assigned to observe while his coworkers show hostility. He witnesses the large-scale handling of corpses and the clinical detachment of the mortuary staff, deepening his sense of horror. The experience marks the early, tense start of his immersion in the job.

Working alone in a small room with an industrial steam cleaning machine, he releases a bird that startles him as he frees the transport cases. He spots a door labeled Notausgang (Emergency Exit) and the moment underscores his vulnerability within the clinical setting. The small incident foreshadows his ongoing struggle to regulate his fear.

A chance encounter with a naked corpse bearing his surname triggers a panic that the body might be his mother. He quickly confirms the corpse is not his mother, but the moment exposes the haunted past he carries. The episode pushes him to seek out his mother in the city.

Roman locates his mother’s address and follows her to an IKEA store, where he finds her lying on a bed as if dead. They become re-acquainted, and he tells her he’s a diving instructor headed for New Zealand, a reference to the subway advertisement. The reunion begins to lay the groundwork for hard truths to emerge.

Back at his mother’s flat, Roman asks why she gave him up. She reveals that giving him up was the best thing she did and then confesses that, when he was a baby, she tried to suffocate him with a pillow to stop his crying. The exchange exposes the blowback of her past choices and deepens Roman’s curiosity about his origins.

Outside the mortuary after his shift, his mother confronts him again and reiterates the reasons behind giving him up. The dialogue exposes the complexity of their relationship and the lasting impact of their separation. The moment underlines the film’s focus on haunted memory rather than external action.

Over the roughly two-week period, small events begin to awaken emotions in Roman and spark a growing interest in understanding his past and in forming sympathetic relationships. The quiet changes mark the start of an emotional awakening beneath his stoic exterior.

The two-week arc culminates with Roman leaving his parole hearing and then visiting the grave of his teenage victim. The ending suggests a reckoning with the past and an ongoing search for meaning beyond institutional life.