Feted at last year's Venice Film Festival, where it was awarded the Grand Jury Prize, "Dog Days" is the feature debut of Austrian documentary maker Ulrich Seidl.

Set over a sweltering summer weekend in the Viennese suburbs, it interweaves the experiences of six sets of characters.

There's the widowed, dog-loving pensioner Mr Walter (Finsches), a control-freak who yearns for his elderly cleaning lady (Gerti Lehner).

A divorced couple (Rathbone, Martini) have to share the same house; while burglar alarm salesman Hruby (Mrva) is attempting to apprehend a local car thief.

A couple of volatile relationships are placed under the microscope; and, finally, there's a female hitchhiker (Hofstätter), irritating drivers with her impudent questions and parroting of lists and advertising jingles.

Loneliness, despair, boredom, entrapment, cruelty (physical and emotional), stagnation, the inability to communicate - "Dog Days" certainly isn't the sort of film to raise an audience's spirits.

The on-screen temperatures may be roasting, yet Seidl observes this catalogue of human misery with an icily clinical detachment, scrupulously arranging his compositions in a sterile milieu.

A sense of place (together with a dark vein of humour) is actually one of the film's strongest assets: affluent suburbia, and its attendant hypermarkets and ring roads, has rarely felt so alienating.

Striving for authenticity and intimacy, the director follows his characters (played mainly by non-professionals) into bathrooms and sex parlours, where the viewer observes their sagging, protuberant flesh.

Missing, however, is any real feeling of compassion towards these forlorn individuals, any sense of the humanity that lies beneath the grotesque façades.

Indeed, the painfully protracted torture scene, which constitutes the film's manufactured climax, suggests that Seidl himself relishes portraying this unpleasantness.

In German with English subtitles.