Brandner’s début film tells of the fate of a teacher who becomes a poacher and as such the prey of his friend, a wolf hunter. The village where the two men live together and make love to each other is located in a government reservation and hence enjoys all kinds of privileges. Sex knows no taboos, happy drugs are freely available and are used at the slightest sign of discontent. In case of an emergency there are two almost unemployed village cops. The enemies are the wolves, the dogs and others that threaten nature, because game can only be killed by the state. When the teacher becomes a poacher to break out of the mechanism of the Utopian village, he threatens the status quo and is regarded by the community as a wolf that has to be eradicated. Brandner uses the sugar-sweet emotions and melodramatic conventions of the Bavarian Heimat film, photographed in a romantic-dramatic, expressive style to provide a critical look at the phenomenon ‘order’.
