Vienna. Two rival ambulance companies—the Kreuzretter and the Rettungsbund—compete with each other. Ex-private detective Brenner and his friend Berti work as paramedics in Kreuzretter. One night, paramedic Munz stops with the ambulance van at a food store and then goes to urinate, while his colleague Gross quickly sneaks into an office and shoots director Stenzl who is having sex with nurse Irmi, and then returns back to the van. Brenner's detective instincts activate and he wants to solve the case, but Gross is soon found dead, strangled in the ambulance van. Brenner's old friend, Klara, helps him. It turns out Brenner's boss Junior led a scheme with Gross, killing rich diabetic widows by injecting dextrose into their blood, causing hyperglycemia, which is untraceable, and then forging their inheritance to get their money. Irmi was on to him, and was thus eliminated. Junior wants to kill Irmi's ex-boyfriend Jürgen, partially paralyzed, by gassing him to death in the ambulance van, but Brenner, Klara and Berti stop and kill Junior.
This film adaptation of Wolf Haas's eponymous novel is an unusual amalgamation of crime and black comedy, reminiscent of a whodunnit Agatha Christie detective crime story, just injected with a lot of raw, grotesque humor ingrained in Austrian mentality. "Come Sweet Death" is not for everyone's taste precisely due to such dark details and ideas, including the farcical premise about a conspiracy in an ambulance agency tasked to save lives misused to kill lives for profit and the subsequent cover-up, but at its core the ex-detective Brenner, now turned a paramedic, is just a cynical, slob version of Hercule Poirot. Some of the best bits are the feisty dialogue between Brenner and a civil policeman who always insults him ("Well, well, is it asshole day today?"). One such exchange starts when two civil policemen again start disparaging him: "Paramedics are always the biggest jerks." - "And the worst cronies", so Brenner jokingly asks them: "So you're applying for the job then?"
There is no civility or gentlemen-like behavior here, everyone is shown in their worst light (in the opening act, the ambulance drivers bet at who can pass through more red traffic lights, while one of them even drives so fast he runs over a dog on the street, yet just has to continue driving to get to the hospital as soon as possible), but even as such, the flawed paramedics are still ethical enough to show integrity and refuse to be part of the crime murder conspiracy. The director Wolfgang Murenberger has no ideals towards the world in general, showing how selfishness, egoism and greed can make even the most noble organizations sink in crime, but he has several stylish images: for instance, in the opening, a static wide shot of trees in a meadow is "interrupted" when a car falls from above the frame. Several moments are heavy handed, crude or underdeveloped, which reduces the enjoyment value, whereas the characters are deliberately kept unlikeable and at a distance from the viewers, which is not quite the best cinematic strategy. However, the violent crime finale is even suspensful and will leave the viewers on the edge of their seats, whereas there are several little jokes scattered throughout (upon hearing about the emergency situation, Brenner extinguishes his cigarette by putting it on top of his ice cream before entering the ambulance van).
Grade:++
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