Lorna is in Belgium on false pretenses. She married a man, a junkie, in order to gain citizenship (and a cash reward). The men who arranged her relocation to Belgium from Albania have a plan for her. Once she is widowed — and the men will see to it that she becomes a widow — she is to marry a Russian, who will use her legal status as a Belgian to gain his own citizenship. When she begins to care for her husband, who is trying hard to dig out of the hole he’s in, with some success, she starts trying to gain him a reprieve from the awful fate that he’s too far into his haze to anticipate. The film is truly Lorna’s story. Not once is the film’s audience given information Lorna is not privy to, or shown a scene that she doesn’t witness. This intense subjectivity, and Lorna’s eventually breakdown in the face of her experience, ultimately yields an unsettling examination of the morals of desperation and the sometimes desperate nature of morality.

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