The Bothersome Man by Per Schreiner

a mesmerising satire of modern life.stunningly tense and thought -provoking. glad i watched it

I loved this strange different movie ; just as I loved You the living and Involuntary . Is Andreas dead , trapped in a grey heaven or hell or in some strange endless city life where every one gets over excited over a furniture catalogue but engages in unconnected emotionless sex. Andreas longs to feel , to taste his food , to get drunk , to receive passion … what an excellent odd movie . The scene of the couple kissing like cold fish on the station platform was just brilliant . After all some people are already leading this kind of grey nice life and haven’t woken up yet.

I have a theory about this movie but if you read this comment, the movie will be spoiled for you. In the first scene, Andreas kills himself by jumping onto a subway track right before the subway pulls into the station. Smoosh, he’s dead. He’s committed suicide. Suicides go to hell — a nice form of hell — but hell nonetheless. Hell is a place that is all shades of grey. Nothing tastes good, booze doesn’t get you drunk and people are all full of false bonhomie, as if afraid to express how they really feel. People go to social gatherings and have girlfriends and boyfriends and wives and husbands but it’s all so tedious and boring and blah, blah, blah.

Andreas complains in general to a man washing his hands in the men’s room of a bar that as much booze as he’s drunk, he’s not drunk and the booze must be watered down or it isn’t booze. The man tells him it is booze but it won’t make anyone drunk. Someone pipes up from a stall in the bathroom and says, “I miss hot chocolate.” And continues to say something like, ‘Here the hot chocolate tastes like nothing, here the pussy tastes like nothing….’

On a number of occasions, while walking past a particular building, Andreas hears beautiful music coming from a basement apartment. This music is entirely out of character with this place he finds himself in. He can’t get into the building where the music is playing. One day he snoops around and finds a way in and makes his way to the basement apartment. He knocks on the door and recognizes the voice of the “hot chocolate” man who was in the bathroom of the nightclub the day after Andreas arrived in nice hell.

Andreas asked to be let in but the man refuses. Andreas insists and eventually, he’s let in. He looks around the man’s apartment, which is a converted basement space with block stone walls and a cement floor. He notices a painting on the wall — an object that is out of place in shades of grey nice hell. Andreas asks the man where he got the painting. The man points to a hole in the stone wall where light is shining through and from which the beautiful music is coming and says to Andreas, “from that hole.”

Andreas and the kindred spirit, over the course of several days, excavate their way through the wall with the hole and eventually reach a place where there is another wall with a hole in it from which they can hear children laughing and music playing. (There are no children in nice hell.) Andreas gets excited and pushes his way through a final couple of feet of debris in front of the wall separating him from whatever the place is on the other side of the wall. He manages to break through the wall and we see a quaint old-fashioned kitchen with a freshly baked cake on a table and voices of children and people talking with the sound of the ocean coming through an open door with bright sunlight streaming in.

The hole Andreas has opened up into this kitchen is very small and he can only get one arm through up to his shoulder… He blindly gropes around, finds the cake and grabs a piece. Suddenly, you see the grey-suited nice hell maintenance men pulling Andreas out of the hole back into the basement apartment. Andreas is stuffing the cake into his mouth; it’s obviously delicious and he’s making yum yum yum noises.

The following day, Andreas arrives at work and finds that he’s been replaced at his job. The grey-suited maintenance men arrive and take Andreas and the kindred spirit man to an administration building in the center of town. The kindred spirit man is told that he may leave. He scurries off. Andreas is told to stay in the car. A group of people Andreas has met since arriving in nice hell gather near the car Andreas is seated in. One of the people in this group breaks away and walks to the car where Andreas is seated. Andreas ignores her but the woman persists and keeps knocking on the window. She says to him that she cannot understand why Andreas has to be such a bother. She says, “What’s wrong with you? People “love it here.” She turns to the group for their opinion and they shake their heads ‘yes,’ in unison. ‘What’s not to like?” she asks. Andreas stares straight ahead and does not respond.

A car arrives — it is the same man who picked up Andreas at the “bus station” and brought Andreas to town when Andreas arrived in nice hell. This man (the nice hell greeter) and the grey-suited maintenance men drive Andreas back to the bus station. They wait for the bus to arrive. Andreas is hidden at the side of the station. A lone elderly woman steps off the bus and the nice hell greeter keeps the woman occupied while the grey-suited maintenance men drag Andreas to the other side of the bus and unceremoniously dump him into a cargo hold and slam the door shut. The bus leaves and Andreas are in for a long, dirty, noisy and bumpy ride. He eventually falls asleep. When he awakens, it very quiet. The bus has stopped. Andreas uses his feet to push open the locked cargo bay door. When he gets it open, there is a flash of bright light and the sound of gale force rushing wind and the ground appears to be drifting sand. The cargo bay door slams down and the movie ends.

It appears that Andreas has arrived in not so nice hell. There is no one there to greet him.

Spoiler alert.
So a man arrives on a bus, the only passenger. He is delivered to a city that lacks sensory stimulation beyond basic, as are the emotions of the people who live and work there. There are no children, only worker age and the elderly. He spies on another man who has discovered a crack in a wall through which he receives sensory stimulation. They work together to tunnel through to the light they can see from the small crack. The man succeeds in getting is arm through to that other side… What is on the other side is the normal lively world we all know. But he is dragged back into his bland world and taken to the same bus he had arrived in. Note that the man although run over by several commuter trains survives horrible injuries and is delivered back to his home that he shares with his girlfriend. Note also that in attempting to escape this bland world, the man had followed the bus that had delivered him to it but it disappeared after traveling a dirt road that leads to a field of rocky ground. After grabbing the man from the hole eventually they dump the man in the cargo compartment of the bus, it travels the dirt road to the rocky ground. The man kicks out the door to escape. When he does… Nothing is there. I think the man has died and gone to hell but does not realize it, as in this new bland world he does not die even though suffering horrible bodily injuries from the commuter trains. And there are no children as being innocents upon death they would go to heaven. The problem is he has become ‘bothersome’ and cannot accept the fate he has created for himself so it is decided to put him back on the bus. When the bus stops after hitting the rocky ground, the man kicks open the door to escape…Unfortunately in the end there is nothing, no other place for him to go. Now this hell may be the result of his real life choices to work and accumulate stuff to exist rather than to really live life. Humans are beings but often choose to be just doers frittering away their lifetimes on that which does not in the end really matter. That is why at the end of the movie the man escapes to nothing. He did not live live in a way that really mattered.