A heated home with electric lights, a useful, respectable job and lovely people to see every day: Ivan Locke had it all a moment ago.

Now it's gone, and he's sitting in a fossil fuel-powered deathtrap like a mobile coffin, which he himself drives towards the grave.

Dietmar Dath

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Maria Wiesner

Editor in the “Society & Style” department.

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This otherwise extremely conscientious man has allowed himself a single mistake in sex ethics, but this one is enough to poison his life.

Of course, the most exciting car ride in recent film history has nothing to do with escape or shootings;

it doesn't take place in a "road movie" either, but wants to point out the incompatibility of the three virtues of family spirit, professionalism and personal responsibility.

The unlucky raven named Ivan Locke, who is sitting at the steering wheel in the yellow shower light of the sometimes flowing, then again slow-moving traffic, has to be with his mentally broken mother in time for the birth of his child, who was conceived outside of what was actually a happy marriage, so that nothing bad happens to the two as childbirth.

At the same time he is held

coordinating a difficult pouring of concrete over the phone on a historically colossal construction site with the potential for horrifying catastrophe, including guiding people who should keep a cool head but prefer to drink alcohol.

And finally he wants and should explain the whole madness to his wife and two underage sons.

Every decision that falls on this man's head from now on is one between the greatest possible dangers, it is not about the difference between good and bad for a moment, but constantly about the immeasurably worse between bad and much worse (a very contemporary one right now Film, then; parallels to the alternatives that formerly reasonably secure private households, economic elites and governments of tolerably stable states see themselves confronted with are inevitable).

When a single character in such a play, completely on her own, fights for survival against the whole world around her on the one hand and against her own lower nature on the other, this is called a "monodrama" in terms of genre aesthetics.

The cinema does not often approach this somewhat tricky form, but prefers it when it wants to tell something totally nerve-wracking about how biting and bitterly determined people in the struggle with natural and elemental forces preserve their dignity or, if lost, recapture it toughly be able.

Justifiably famous examples of this are the Hemingway film adaptation “The Old Man and the Sea” (1958) by John Sturges with Spencer Tracy, the mountaineer hanging game “127 Hours” (2010) by Danny Boyle with James Franco or the shipwreck drama “All is Lost” (2013) directed by JC Chandor and starring Robert Redford.