Keti, a relatively young mother of a teenage boy Nika, is still a party animal. After a night of serious partying in Georgia’s capital Tbilisi, she wakes up with a bad hangover. She has promised her son to go swimming in a lake nearby. When Keti refuses to go home, Nika takes the car and drives back home alone, even though he does not have a driving license. On the way, the inevitable happens: in the dark, he hits an old man, Otar, right in front of his house. Otar’s grandson Oto pulls Nika out of the car and beats him up before his mother Tamara manages to calm things down.
A police officer and a doctor arrive: Otar turns out to be dead. Instead of filing a complaint, Tamara demands a big amount of money to be paid within 24 hours. The officer is in on the blackmail. Later it will be revealed that his relationship with the family is close, if not intimate.
Back in Tbilisi, Keti tries to get a loan from the bank, begs her parents for money and sells her old car. But she is nowhere close to the amount requested. Nika is about to go to a party with his girlfriend, Ana. They first met at Tbilisi’s famous cable car, where he sexually abuses her after she gives him permission for a kiss. It is a very unpleasant scene, where Nika clumsily and aggressively tries to grab her.
The beauty of ‘Otar’s Death’ is that Bliadze, who wrote the film with Elmar Imanov, never judges his characters. Instead, he lets them breathe and live without siding with anyone. The film reminds us of the work of Asghar Farhadi and the Dardennes brothers, where the audience is presented with a holistic image of the characters and understands more about them than the characters do. The film portrays no one as an absolute villain, but as faulty people who possibly are victims themselves of the system which corrupts them. In a way, this provides ‘Otar’s Death’ with a much-needed sense of humour when things tend to get too tragic.
