Veronika is a young woman from
Ljubljana,
Slovenia, who appears to have a perfect life, but nevertheless decides to take her own life by overdosing with sleeping pills. While she waits to die, she cancels the suicide letter she starts to her parents while suddenly provoked by a magazine article. The magazine article wittily asks "Where is Slovenia?", so she writes a letter to the press justifying her suicide, the idea is to make the press believe that she has killed herself because people don't even know where Slovenia is. Her plan fails and she wakes up from the coma in Villette, a mental hospital in Slovenia, where she is told she has only a few days to live due to heart condition caused by the overdose. Her presence there affects all of the mental hospital's patients, especially Zedka, who has
clinical depression; Mari, who has
panic attacks; and Eduard, who has
schizophrenia, and with whom Veronika falls in love. During her internment in Villette she realizes that she has nothing to lose and can, therefore, do what she wants, say what she wants and be who she wants without having to worry about what others think of her; as a mental patient, she is unlikely to be criticized. Because of this new-found freedom, Veronika experiences all the things she never allowed herself to experience, including hatred and love. In the end it is found that Dr. Igor has repeatedly injected a drug called Fenotal into her to stimulate heart attaks in a drastic attempt and provocative experiment to see if you can "shock" someone into wanting to live by convincing her that death is imminent? Like a doctor applying
defibrillator paddles to a
heart attack victim, Dr. Igor's "prognosis" jump-starts Veronika's new appreciation of the world around her. ==References==