Yugo Florida, the first feature by Serbian director Vladimir Tagić, best known for the acclaimed TV series Operation Sabre, is probably one of the saddest films to come out this year, although it has a peppering of absurdist humour and a thin thread of hope revealed at the very end. It has screened in competition at the Sarajevo Film Festival.

Thirty-five-year-old Zoran (Andrija Kuzmanović, also best known for his TV roles) is kind of a runner on a Big Brother-like reality show, working night shifts. Chronically sleep-deprived, he starts unravelling when he learns that his father, Vesa (controversial screenwriter, actor and musician Nikola Pejaković), has leukaemia. But he doesn’t really realise that he is losing it: refusing to accept his dad’s impending demise, Zoran, together with his mum, long separated from Vesa, focuses on getting him into a private hospital, with the public health system in tatters. He also keeps grasping at his failed emotional life, trying to re-connect with his former long-term girlfriend Tamara (Hana Selimović), having Viber sex with a woman we never meet and falling for one of the participants in the reality show (Jana Milosavljević).

Tagić’s Serbia is one of muddy small towns (Vesa lives in Mladenovac, near Zoran’s dull, grey Belgrade), absurdly impenetrable bureaucracies that extend from hospitals to a café at a petrol station, and single men’s stuffy, messy rooms, in which we can almost smell unwashed sheets and dusty carpets, courtesy of Dragana Baćović’s production design. The trashy reality show and the exorbitantly expensive private clinic, as well as its detached staff, represented by a commanding nurse (Jovana Stojiljković), complete the convincing picture of the world Zoran inhabits, and gets lost in. And let’s not forget Vesa’s titular, notoriously unreliable but stubbornly resilient Serbian-made car (the last one was produced almost 20 years ago) – an apt, if perhaps overly obvious, metaphor for its owner.

Co-written by the director and Milan Ramšak Marković, the film has a traditional three-act structure, and throughout the first hour, we witness failure after failure from almost every character. Zoran’s insecurities and regrets won’t let him surface from his low-key depression, and he inadvertently keeps pulling others down with him. Vesa, similarly, won’t let go of his stubborn obstinacy and old-man resentments until the final stretch, when Aleksandar Karaulić’s cinematography shifts from 4:3 to a 16:9 aspect ratio, signalling liberation and acceptance. But is it too little, too late, for Vesa? The answer will depend on the viewer.

Pejaković vulnerably embodies the bitter Vesa, and he is a fitting partner to Kuzmanović’s desperate Zoran. The lead actor looks like he is on the verge of tears for most of the running time, which partly stems from the lack of sleep but is no less disconcerting for that. The melancholy solo piano score by Valeria Krachunova is occasionally uplifted with strings and chimes, and a smattering of Serbian and old Yugoslav pop and folk songs adds, at least for local audiences, some recognisable shifts in the subtler meanings.

A story of lives perceived as failures by people who live them, of family secrets and grudges, of regrets and shame that the characters are too emotionally damaged to face up to or let go of, Yugo Florida offers a difficult but honest emotion that will be painfully relatable to male audiences.

Yugo Florida is a co-production between Sense Production (Serbia), Contrast Films (Bulgaria), La Belle Affair (France), Eclectica (Croatia) and Adriatic Western (Montenegro).