Austrian filmmaker Barbara Albert's second feature is an ambitious and unpredictable mosaic of provincial working class life. It's a film about death, grief, unhappiness, loneliness and joyless sex, yet it's also about moments of joy, tenderness and compassion, using the concept of chaos theory to explore the seemingly random existences of its characters. Albert's directorial vision is unquestionably distinctive.

In the prologue to Free Radicals, a young Austrian woman, Manu (Kathrin Resetarits), who's returning from a carefree holiday in Brazil, is the only survivor of a plane crash. Cut to six years later and Manu is working at a supermarket in her home town in Austria, when she's involved in a fatal car accident. Her husband (Georg Friedrich), her daughter (Deborah Ten Brink), her siblings (Marion Mitterhammer and Rupert Lehofer), and her best friend (Ursula Strauss) are left to deal with the pain of bereavement, whilst the teenage driver of the other vehicle discovers that his own girlfriend will be paralysed for life.

"IT'S NOTABLE FOR ALBERT'S VISUAL ASSURANCE"

Although Free Radicals takes part in a recognizably humdrum consumer world of supermarkets, malls, lottery competitions and promotional giveaways, its inhabitants are attempting to find a spiritual dimension to their fraught existences. Through a TV programme called Forgive Me, Albert shows how the mass media can exploit the grief of ordinary people, but at the same time she also pays tribute to the pleasure her characters derive from pop music. Two of the film's most powerful sequences are Manu and her pal driving to a disco and joyfully singing along to Aha's Take On Me, and the Magnolia-style rendition of Nights In White Satin by the middle-aged members of a church choir.

Free Radicals is also notable for Albert's visual assurance, as she expertly cuts between the interweaving stories before bringing the cast together for a concluding public event. At several points in the film the camera hovers above the earthly proceedings: perhaps it's Manu, watching out over those she's left behind, or perhaps it's the perspective of the butterfly whose flapping wings trigger the whole mysterious chain of events.

In German with English subtitles.