The film tells the story of the rise and fall of a German businessman who is fascinated by dreams of great success.

"In the end the decline of this climber is not to be halted. With his panic-like fixation that he has to taste everything that could possibly be worth tasting, Ulrich makes a fundamental error. His mistaken estimate of the capital at his disposal is exceeded only by his mistaken assessment of his own feelings. His calculations are at fault when he only regards his friend and his wife as factors in his strategy for success, without taking their own lives into consideration. In this film Marianne Lüdcke develops a tensely- conveyed double message; greed for possessions is deadly for other people - and for oneself.
Marianne Lüdcke, the director from Berlin, has adapted material form Dieter Wellerhof's novel "The Winner Takes All" for her own purposes, and plunges into the fusion of private and business lives so popular on television, relishing every conceiveable, melodramatic element of the material unashamedly. But she manages to avoid all triviality by her dry, occasionally blunt realism, deliberately revealing only fragments of the story. The composition, which demands acknowledgement, and the excellent acting give the film considerable weight.
(Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)