Four residents of a downtown Zagreb apartment building share walls, hallways, and secrets, each carrying a different background—ethnic, religious, and sexual—that makes trust feel fragile. Yet the film threads a darkly comic note through their lives: a dog poisoner lurks in the city, adding a strange undercurrent to every fragile alliance.
Vjekoslav Kralj [Nebojša Glogovac] is a high school history teacher who, despite being homosexual and a transvestite, is also a fervent Croatian nationalist who lives with his aging Ustasha father. One night, while dressed as a woman, he is beaten by hooligans and taken to hospital, where he encounters his neighbor Maja Samardžić [Ksenija Marinković], a nurse who has endured her own painful history. Maja’s husband, Ante Samardžić [Dejan Aćimović], is a police officer and ethnic Serb who struggles with a Croatian citizenship exam that he must pass—complicated by his dyslexia. When Maja volunteers to help look after Vjekoslav and his father, she declines money and instead asks him to assist Ante with the studying, forging an uneasy, tentative bridge between two households.
During their first session, Vjekoslav’s blunt disdain for Serbs and his own stubborn nationalism collide with Ante’s counterattack about homosexuals, leaving both men offended. Yet Maja insists they meet again, and she refuses to let old wounds dictate the future. She tells him that “love doesn’t pick and choose” as she shares that Ante served in the Croatian military during the Yugoslav Wars, while she had a miscarriage while pregnant. As they navigate a social worker’s interview about an adoption license, their conversations gradually reveal how much they all long to belong to something larger than the prejudice that surrounds them. Vjekoslav’s closet full of his mother’s sewing, and the Ustasha uniform he keeps, become potent symbols of a past that haunts him—moments he counters with a quiet reminiscence about the Sacred Band of Thebes.
Meanwhile, a fluttering thread remains: Ante spots the dog poisoner in a cafe window, but the figure slips away, leaving the adults to juggle fear with the daily grind. Their sessions become a mix of tense debate and surprising cooperation. When Ante presses Vjekoslav to be honest about his hatred, Vjekoslav recalls a traumatic childhood memory of Serbian police officers humiliating his mother while visiting his jailed father, and he doubles down on a vision of a Croatia that could be cleansed of non-Croats and homosexuals. Ante responds with a different memory of fear and loyalty, and the conversation shifts from confrontation to cautiously shared vulnerability. A moment of vulnerability deepens their bond: Vjekoslav opens up about his long-time lover, Bobo, and the grief of Bobo’s cancer diagnosis and suicide a year earlier.
As the days pass, tensions between neighbors soften. Vjekoslav agrees to help Ante study, even teaching a memorization trick that proves useful in their sessions. He also engages more with Maja, helping with makeup and dressing, a small act of tenderness that marks a shift in their dynamic. A drunken, reflective night finds Vjekoslav recalling Bobo and his mother, underscoring how grief still threads through his life. The trio increasingly relies on one another, and the once-tense atmosphere around identity and belonging begins to loosen.
With Vjekoslav’s support, Ante passes his exam, and with Maja’s perseverance they receive an official adoption license. Yet personal loss comes into sharper focus as Vjekoslav’s father dies. He dresses his father in his own military uniform and calls a priest, then goes outside to the bench where Bobo once shot himself. When Ante and Maja arrive, they find a priest already present, and they discover Vjekoslav on the bench, unable to go through with ending his life. They calm him and, in a quiet, hopeful moment, invite him to be their child’s godfather, a gesture he accepts with a tenderness that feels earned.
The next day, a joyful road opens before them as Maja and Ante embark on a motorbike trip to begin their new life as parents, telling Vjekoslav that they will name their child after him. The moment feels like a quiet revolution—a small family formed from a tangled web of past hurts and mutual care. Yet the final image lingers: the dog poisoner revisits the street outside, a chilling reminder that beneath the film’s warmth lies a city where old wounds can still surface in the most ordinary moments.
