After moving to a small island in the Adriatic, a young priest becomes determined to offset the dwindling population by encouraging more pregnancies. But he comes up against an increase in the use of contraception, which, through a devious scheme, he slowly starts to eradicate. Rather than being the basis for a dark psychological thriller, this is actually the plot of a comedy, and a rather farcical one at that. The high-pitched tone often successfully masks the murkiness of the plot (which involves our borderline-sociopathic priest poking holes in condoms), but too often, the light and the dark sit a little too uncomfortably close together. It’s tightly plotted and contains some smart narrative shifts, but the tonal high-wire act is ultimately too ambitious for Croatian director Vinko Brešan to pull off.
