I am into indie films as mainstream ones.Don't get me too wrong.That said , Klopka surely is in indie low budget picture. Mind the " picture " though ... And here lies a question ? Does the quality of the practical , literal picture , frame by frame / photography matter? Does it affect the overall impression and judgement of whether a film is good or bad? For example if one takes a certain story , a particular script , will the film be better if you put in a good cinematography , and worse if you put in a -not so good- cinematography. In my humble opinion , it certainly does. After all , lets all say it once more .. IT IS A VISUAL EXPERIENCE.And so goes down the drain Klopka... Each scene is filmed with a camera. I can say that much. About lighting , scene decoration , vibrant , intense colors and such , there are none. They did shoot the film , you can watch it. Its just that throughout the whole thing , you are thinking its your buddy filming with his home-camera. And it doesn't add the realistic vibe. Its just bad lights , bad photography , nothing to do with realism.So thats one. Two , even if this film had great mainstream photography like a Nolan's film or an Alfonso Cuaron's one , the story isn't good itself.Like i mentioned , its Denzel Washington's "John Q" (2002) that is 5 years earlier ... its the same story , just with a worse photography , and switch the famous actors for unknown Serbian ones. It doesn't offer new insight in the topic. Desperate father has a sick son with a defective heart - goes bad to get the money for the operation.It has some weak improbable points too. This section contains SPOILERS! ----------------------------------------------------For example after confessing the murder to the police , they let him go , showing that the mafia guy has the police boss on his side. Well combining this fact, and then having the mafia guy being broke and owing money with his house almost in ruins ... i wonder , how the hell does he still have the police on his side? -----------------------------------------------------End of SPOILERS!I read good comments over here , and someone did a comparison of this film to the German " The lives of others" . So me , having firm respect for the lives of others , was convinced to see this with an open mind but slightly high expectations , because believe it or not , i am into foreign gems , Korean cinema , french , Italian , Belgian whatever...Well i saw this thing and this is the review. Nothing special , i give it a 5/10 because of the bad photography and strongly because its a story that was made better in a film five years earlier.To be fair , the actors were alright. Nothing great , but nothing bad. It was decent acting.

A cornered father with no ability to finance an expensive heart surgery for his dying son commits an unspeakable sin to save his son's life. The film explores the phenomenon of putting a value on life and how that value, as priceless as we may perceive life to be, can be expressed in some currency. It also addresses the issues of social inequality and addresses a very real problem with health care in Serbia. Having grown up in the region I can tell you that advertising in the newspapers in search for hope in a foreign hospital is very common. For a family that may only have an income of only a couple of hundred EU per month coming up with the sums required by these foreign hospitals is practically impossible. While people show solidarity and always try to help even when they don't have money, often this help comes too late. This is why the proposition the father gets and the whole story became more believable for me. Vindication is perhaps not a possibility, but could you find another way for him to save his son? After all, what's the value of the life of a "bad" man compared to the one of your innocent child. Ultimately, all parties have different ideas about the value of the lives of Peter or Nemanja, but we are left with the taste of sacrifice, atonement and the fact that some problems simply have no good solution.

Klopka is a suffocating film, so dense in moral righteousness, it defies criticism. It is a lot like the post-Milosevic Serbia (morose, self-pitying and self-important) but not for the reasons its makers would like us to think. The story is presented as a mirror to modern Serbia, but it is very unoriginal, sharing a similar structure with numerous European films: A decent, if somewhat hapless, man agrees to kill a stranger to earn the money that will pay for the operation to save his only child's life. To say anything else would be to spoil the movie, although the plot moves along with unnecessary predictability and contrivance. The actors are highly competent, but they are not given much room to inject any ambiguity into their characters. Only Miki Manojlovic's performance lifts the film from its manufactured faux-noir ordinariness. As the vacuous, soulless Milos, he is the only character that can be considered unique to modern Serbia.Srdan Golubovic is a promising director. Nearly each shot in the film can be blown up as a still photograph and displayed in an exhibition. He is in control – perhaps excessively so… Ultimately, the film collapses under its own relentless depression. We are not free to question as to how a professional couple leading modest and frugal lives without any debt burden cannot raise 26,000 Euros. Certainly, it is not because they splash on fashion. (Nebosja Glogovac as Mladen wears a couple of tattered gray tops throughout the film. Much is made of his 30-year old Renault.) If you don't know any better, you'd come out of cinema thinking that this could happen only in Serbia and society is to blame. The truth is that Serbia's poor is much better off than those of the United States. At least there is a public health system in Serbia that works – mostly… It is a pity. Because one scene in the film is so fraught with genuine suspense, it leaves the viewer wondering what a better film Klopka would have been if the filmmakers left some of their melancholy at home before coming to the set.

We went to the showing of Klopka at the Berlinale without any info or knowledge of the film...basically it was the only one we could get tickets for on a night when we could find a babysitter.Anyway, we arrived with no preconceptions and the film was simply brilliant. The story was thoughtful without being pretentious, the acting was superb, and the little nods to Serbian society (and how that reflects on the rest of us as well) were thought-provoking without being in your face. Hopefully everyone will have the chance to see this movie, but I guess not...if you do, don't miss it...and congratulations to the people behind it for a wonderful achievement.