To be alone is the fate of all great minds, said Schopenhauer. And the same goes for all the mediocre ones, says the film Inventory. In this wickedly bleak opener to the European Union Film Festival—the one film to get an in-cinema screening at The Cinematheque—a middle-aged man named Boris descends into a kind of cleansing paranoia as the illusions of security are mercilessly stripped from his world. Played by Rados Bolcina, Boris is a likably ordinary chap with a decent university job, loving wife, adult son, and a life of modest, reassuring routine. All of that is upended in the blink of an eye when a bullet inexplicably rips through his apartment window, burying a slug in the drywall. Is someone trying to kill him? An ineffectual police investigation offers some red herrings while Boris is forced, gradually, to suspect those closest to him.

The film has a neat way of raising a possible culprit or motive—for a moment it seems like Inventory might become a Kafkaesque thriller about two men with the same name trying to murder each other—before tearing off in an entirely new direction. Like Boris, we’re left with little more than the sense that existence has an appalling barrenness at its core, and that each soul makes its journey in terrified solitude. A comedy, in other words, pitched so low in writer-director Darko Sinko’s debut feature that only dogs can hear it, which is exactly what I want from my Slovenian cinema. Actually, Darko Sinko would make a great alternative title.

Stir, September 2021