Suction

The film opens with an ominous image: a young man with a buzz cut raises his arm in an effort to shield himself from the wood chips raining down on him; the pelting of falling chips blends into the machine saw’s swelling roar. Cut to the dark forest of a computer game where one forestry vehicle chases another; the disembodied voice of a child speaks over the phone with their gaming partner, through whose eyes we view the imagined scene.

In twelve short scenes, director and co-writer Elias Rauchenberger records the everyday life and loneliness of a young Ukrainian, a refugee moving through Vienna like a phantom. Suction concentrates on life between two worlds: the protagonist longs for his mother and younger sister whom he had to leave behind, preventing him from truly arriving in the city where he now lives.

As a casual laborer and asylum seeker he drifts through underground parking lots and compulsory language courses, killing the empty time left to him at some lake or another, on escalators, in trams, and beside the walls of a flak tower. One night, at the edge of a busy city street, he attacks a friend with the aggression of despair; an attack that turns into a feverish embrace.  
Rauchenberger’s staging moves insistently, yet with complete calm, toward confinement and darkness—and toward the superimposition of inner and outer realities: like a dying animal, the sister’s toppled virtual crawler excavator writhes through the gaming world’s nocturnal thicket, ultimately shifting into a real image in the finale. From the cab of a circling vehicle, a child gazes at the stack of timber in a sawmill: uprooted, cut, made transportable. (Stefan Grissemann)

Translation: Lisa Rosenblatt