Nick and Costas are friends and room-mates who share the same hobby: target-practice. Former champions they now compete with each other occasionally. One day at the shooting-gallery a strange man, Andreas, appears on the scene. The two friends are going through a particularly rough time - Nick is feeling low because his father has died and Costas is worried about his huge gambling debt and the fact that the mob is after him. When Andreas offers Nick a job as a contract killer, he agrees to do it so that he can help his friend pay off his gambling debts. When it comes to the kill, however, Nick finds that he cannot pull the trigger. Daphne, a mysterious woman Costas has met in a bar and with whom he is having a passionate love affair finishes the job unbeknownst to Nick. It turns out that she is Andreas' partner. Costas who accepts the idea of killing for money more readily than his friend is approached by Andreas to carry on where Nick left off...
An exciting look at a world of stormy passions, where violence has gained the upper hand, where friendship and love have become a matter of the utmost urgency. Nikos Grammatikos has made what one could term the thinking man's thriller, without resorting to any moralising or blood baths. And if somewhere in the middle of the film the "Trypes" sing (almost like α voice crying in the wilderness): "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", some other lines (of Eliot's) are a more fitting epitaph: "This is the way the world ends not with a bang but with a whimper." |