Metacritic reviews

Brims with energy, carefully drawn characters and fine acting.

Deftly intercutting between several tenuously-connected lives, Barbara Albert's astringent drama is transformed by bright flashes of compassion.

The parallel stories don't always dovetail with each other smoothly, but the acting is strong and the atmosphere is powerful.

An intelligent, viscerally intellectual exercise in ensemble acting and associative montage, enlivened with some terrific visual and dramatic ideas.

Austrian auteur Barbara Albert uses complex mathematics, chaos theory and the music of Dutch pop sensation A-Ha to explore the connections that link a group of disparate characters.

An often compelling drama, marbled with dry humor and flecked with the supernatural, that provides food for thought but doesn't quite reach the brass ring.

Despite the melodramatic plot twists, there's little emotional resonance to the proceedings, and the film's attempts to link them in metaphysical fashion prove overly ambitious and pretentious.

Although Free Radicals overflows with messy feelings, it maintains such a measured distance from the gathered cries and whispers that it is difficult to empathize with the characters' fears and sorrows. Most of the women are victims, most of the men selfish pigs, and their stories are jarringly punctuated by brutish, joyless bouts of sex.

At first I thought this was a Michael Haneke knockoff, but it's more depressing and less edifying than most of those narrative experiments, which is why I eventually tuned it out.