A butterfly flaps its wings, literally, near the beginning of Free Radicals, a miserablist mosaic from Austrian director Barbara Albert. Innocent though it may appear, flap-flap-flapping away in the forest green, this insidious creature sets off a chain of events that guarantees the film's sad-sack ensemble a life of crushing banality, permanent affliction, and joyless sex—or, if they're really lucky, a gruesome death. Presiding over these scurrying ants like a kid with a magnifying glass, Albert sets out to demonstrate the cruel interconnectedness of fate, with seemingly random events congealing into a clear, inescapable, and predetermined pattern. And, as if the butterfly isn't enough to get the point across, she also throws in a professor lecturing his bored students on the wonders of fractals and chaos theory.
En route back to Austria from a vacation in Rio, Kathrin Resetarits becomes the unwitting catalyst for disaster when she's the sole survivor of a plane crash. Cut to six years later: Resetarits now has a husband (Georg Friedrich) and a melancholy daughter, but death finally catches up to her after a night of clubbing, when she collides head-on with a car full of teenagers. The blame is laid on Dominik Hartel, who's burdened with not only Resetarits' death and a passenger's paralysis, but also the memory of a brother who was kidnapped and buried in the woods many years earlier. Other unfortunates include Resetarits' best friend (Ursula Strauss), who carries out a guilt-wracked affair with Resetarits' widowed husband; a portly choir singer who takes drastic measures after being rejected by a balding schlub; and a shy couple who attempt an awkward courtship at the local McDonald's.
Ironically, what's missing from Albert's daisy chain, other than compassion and empathy, is some sort of grand design, a raison d'être beyond the director merely playing the role of all-powerful storyteller. Albert's accomplished countryman Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher) attempted a similar puzzle-picture to much greater success with 2000's Code Unknown, which assembled its fragments into a powerful thesis on how violence tears through the fabric of everyday life. Though assured to a clinical fault, Free Radicals keeps promising to lead to some great epiphany when Albert's structural latticework finally pays off, but the moment never arrives. However, Scandinavians had better watch their back: With Albert, Haneke, and Ulrich Seidl (Dog Days) leading the charge, Austria may be the new gloom capital of world cinema.