"Her hatred was focused on her authoritarian father who wanted to mould her to fit into his picture of normality. These are conditions that effect thousands of other teenagers, but they do not all go around and murder their parents, which this one did. But why? Her answer was simple: she saw the weapon lying on the kitchen cupboard, took it and killed her mother, then her father."

One the verge of becoming a woman, Rita's sexual awakening leads her to clumsy intimacy - first with an 11-year-old boy, obviously too young, then to a bus driver, who is too old. Her efforts to break out of solitude isolate her even more, until one day she finds a solution.

 "You can easily summarise all the circumstances and events that contributed to this coincidence and led to the murders taking place. Though I do not want to ignore or deny them, I am mainly interested in the coincidence that ­ when all is said and done ­ is decisive in this story. There is an alarming arbitrariness to this, an arbitrariness of a nature void of sympathy and mercy. Things happen the way they happen," Hausner concludes.

Jørn Rossing Jensen