Atmen (2011)

19-year-old Roman (Thomas Schubert) rarely talks. He does what the guards in the detention center tell him to do and then goes back to his room where he spends long hours thinking about the past and what went wrong. He is angry, but not because of what he has done. He is angry because he was abandoned by his mother and denied the chance to be normal.

With only a few weeks left before his parole hearing, Roman applies for a temp job in a local mortuary. The guys working there are surprised that someone so young would want to be around corpses, but welcome him anyway. One of them predicts in front of Roman that in a couple of weeks he will be gone. Then they begin teaching him what to do.

Each morning Roman leaves the detention center and heads to Vienna. Spending time amongst normal people on the way to the mortuary makes him feel good - and angry because he isn't one of them. Spending time with dead people often makes him feel dizzy. Before starting his new job he never knew that corpses could smell this bad.

In a morgue on the outskirts of the city Roman sees the body of a young and beautiful woman. Even though he has never met his mother, somehow she reminds him of her. He decides to track her down through a social security office. Later that day, he phones her from the detention center and listens to her breathing.

Eventually, Roman gathers the courage to visit his mother (Karin Lischka). They meet in front of a tall apartment building with a large parking lot. She buys him a cup of coffee and asks him how his life without her was. Roman refuses to talk about it; all he wants to know is why his mother abandoned him. Her response confuses him - she's got plenty of reasons, most of them good ones, but does not have time to talk about the past. Before they part ways, Roman helps his mother carry the comfy mattress she buys from a local IKEA store.

Roman and his mother meet one more time, in the subway. This time she is willing to talk, but he is no longer willing to listen. Nevertheless, he lets her speak. What she has to say surprises him, but also reaffirms his conviction that he was a mistake that should have never happened.

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