WHEELS

It is the proverbial Dark and Stormy Night when traveler Nemanya, on his way to see his family to plan his imminent wedding, is forced to pull off the road in the downpour and seek shelter at The Wheel, a strange, backwater inn. Suddenly the environs of cosmopolitan Belgrade wash away; Nemanya (and you) are in the shadowy byways of Eastern Europe, where myth, fear, and imagination have spawned the likes of Dracula and “The Fearless Vampire Killers.” An unknown serial killer dubbed the Laughing Monster has terrorized this region of the country, and tonight The Wheel's bartender and several armed citizen-vigilantes are up very late, no plans to go anywhere. Who is the Laughing Monster? Maybe a suspicious stranger without sufficient alibi, who stumbles in from the cold and rain. Poor Nemanya will suffice… Everything the young man says and does to protest his innocence just seems to dig him deeper and deeper into a morass of guilt and doom. Sinister, stylish, and cloaked in gallows humor, Djordje Milosavljevic's feature debut makes the Bates Motel suddenly seem a rather…cozy den, by comparison. (In Serbo-Croatian with English subtitles.)