Competitive cyclist Roman (Jirí Konvalinka) pushes himself to his physical limits, putting his ambitions on a collision course with the equally determined desire of his wife Šarlota (Tereza Hofová) to get pregnant.
First things first: the film’s Czech title Domestik is translated as the French Domestique, rather than the more obvious ‘domestic’, because the French word, as it turns out, is used as a technical term in competitive cycling. This is the team member who sets the pace at the start of a race, thereby sacrificing their own chances for victory. As the film begins, Roman is doggedly attempting to improve his stamina so that he can break out of this subservient role and finally become a real competitor.
However, the more general sense of ‘domestic’ also has a place in the film — much of the action, after all, takes place in Roman and Šarlota’s minimalist flat, constantly kept pristine by an automated vacuum cleaner — while the more dismissive meaning of the word (‘servant’) is reflected in the back-and-forth power play between husband and wife. Šarlota (Charlotte) emerges as the more intriguing character of the pair, running the house and determining what they eat — often in the service of her meticulous preparations for pregnancy — but providing stability in the form of her job as a teacher and, as she often points out, sacrificing her own wishes to support Roman’s.
As the couple’s individual obsessions begin to separate them, what started as a domestic drama gradually turns into something closer to a horror film. (The most outlandish gadget Roman uses to improve his performance, an ‘oxygen tent’ that actually deprives the user of oxygen, is even shot like some malign presence in the home, complete with its own discordant musical score.) There’s an increasing emphasis on bodily fluids, particularly blood. The theme of transformation, evident from the start, takes on a more sinister cast, as the piously honourable Roman begins to cut ever more corners. His behaviour becomes much more unpredictable; the couple’s sexual encounters start to blur the lines of consent. Towards the end, the transformations each character undergoes begin to resemble a form of transference.
The keen attention the film’s writer-director Adam Sedlák pays to every shot only adds to the film’s oppressive sense of obsession. Some of his techniques are used repeatedly, creating a deliberately unsettling tone: the dialogue from one scene straying into the next, for instance, or a scene playing out largely in a blur, while some insignificant detail remains sharply in focus. There is sometimes a sense that the film’s undoubted stylishness comes at the expense of a more humane approach to its characters. However, Tereza Hofová, in particular, brings a variety of colours to the often enigmatic Šarlota.
In his role as screenwriter, Sedlák favours an elliptical approach from the beginning — the most overt indication of Roman’s position within the cycling team comes not from a clue in the (already sparse) dialogue but from the film’s title — and his directorial attachment to showing details of people and things out of context complements this perfectly. By the end of the film, however, this approach has become so overwhelming, and the couple’s actions so removed from reality, that the viewer may be forgiven for sometimes wondering what on earth is going on.