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To tame chance by the roll of a die, that is the ultimate wet dream of addicted gambler Kurt in the Austrian-Swiss film Spiele Leben (You Bet Your Life). When we first meet Kurt (Georg Friedrich), he is really into card games and quickly out of money: he sells his car to play and loses. To cover up this loss for his hospital nurse girlfriend Manu (Gerti Drassl) he bangs his head into the wall on purpose and insinuates he has had a grave accident while driving. “Total loss” he says of the car, which is indeed not a total lie.

Unemployed Kurt is anything if not resourceful and when Manu refuses to hand over her savings for their shared dream of a new apartment, Kurt photocopies an old tile depicting the Madonna and puts the copy back into the frame; the real Madonna he pawns for some more gambling money. When he runs into Elvira (Claudia Martini), a woman who seems to be lucky at a fruit machine, he takes her to the casino where she keeps winning at roulette by rolling the die that was part of her earring and lets it decide how she should place her bets. Kurt is soon hooked on this new trick of predicting chance and soon the die rules his life: for every decision he comes up with six possible solutions and then lets the die decide.

When Manu has had enough, Kurt finds a new job (decided on by the die) and through it finds someone who is willing to play the game just as much as he is (his choice is confirmed by the die yet again). Tanja (Birgit Minichmayr) is even more of a freewheeler than Kurt is and together they go on the ideal holiday: to a Czech casino where fortunes can be made – or lost. Georg Friedrich and Birgit Minichmayr are perfectly cast as Kurt and Tanja and their chemistry is as insane as the characters they portray. Writer-director (and former actor) Antonin Svoboda's direction is suitably manic and the film’s pace follows Kurt and Tanja’s descent into arbitrary madness very well. Because there are rarely six viable options for every decision, Kurt and Tanja’s life will of course spin out of control sooner rather than later and in a somewhat predictable if neat twist even the film’s own ending has multiple outcomes; depending on the simple roll of a die.