The sound design is equally important. The dialogue is a rapid-fire, overlapping cacophony of insults, threats, and wails. Characters never listen; they merely wait for their turn to shout. This auditory chaos perfectly mirrors the political landscape of Yugoslavia that Šijan was indirectly critiquing—a federation of loud, mutually suspicious republics all shouting past one another.
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It uses "black humor" to find comedy in death, greed, and the absurdity of family loyalty. The sound design is equally important
No one learns anything. No one changes. The only movement is lateral or downward. No one changes
By the end, through a series of tragicomic accidents—mistaken identities, a drowned cousin, a cuckolded husband with a shotgun—most of the family ends up dead. The final, iconic shot shows the survivors, covered in mud and blood, mechanically running in place on the spot where their house once stood. They are still running the marathon.
The "plot" is a Rube Goldberg machine of parricidal impulses. The family’s greatest ambition is to finally bury their aging, tyrannical grandfather (also Pantelija). However, he stubbornly refuses to die. The marathon of the title is not a sporting event but the endless, circular struggle of daily life: getting up, arguing, digging a grave, filling it, fighting over the family coffin (which is kept on a pedestal as a status symbol), and collapsing back into bed. When a rival funeral home, run by the eccentric "Bela" (The White One) and his silent, hulking son, enters the fray, the petty rivalry escalates into a full-scale war of caskets, corpses, and honor.