Heribert (2023)

A voice wakes in the dark and is not sure where it begins. It is a hippo's voice, deep and guttural, a cadence made of hoots and grunts that now forms words. The speaker has no sense of future or present--only a long, looping archive of what it remembers. It asks itself aloud: Is that noise mine? What is this thing I use to make it? The first images that arrive are of water and broad teeth, of heat and an unfamiliar sky; memory unfurls unevenly, stitched from flashes rather than a line. The creature knows one absolute: it is no longer living.

The ghost calls itself Pepe, the name newspapers and television settled upon when humans took interest. Its recollection begins with displacement. People remove the young hippo from the continent where hippos belong; they place him on a transport bound for Colombia. The animal does not understand passports or crates, but it retains the sense of being moved out of a place it has never truly known. In Colombia the hippo arrives at the private menagerie of Pablo Escobar. The scene shows iron bars, planted palms, a small manmade lake cupped by concrete. Escobar's zoo becomes the hippo's new world, another island of water and confinement. Pepe learns the boundaries of his enclosure and the faces of those who approach: keepers who throw food, strangers who press cameras against their cages, the occasional visitor who laughs and points.

In the voice of the dead, memories fold into stories-within-stories. Pepe repeats images of other animals in the compound and of the curious human rituals that surround captivity: a child leaning over a barrier with a treat, a man in dark glasses who walks with an entourage, the low-speed whir of helicopters that sometimes cross the sky. The sound of a helicopter becomes a small, frantic drum inside Pepe's chest. When the whirring approaches, the hippo presses his bulk closer to the water and tries to make himself small, misunderstanding how this body works, not recognizing the human machines that loom above.

Time in Pepe's speech is not linear. He remembers the day he first senses language forming in him. It arrives oddly, like a new limb: a syntax built out of hoots and breath. He narrates in the present and the past at once, telling of mornings when the keeper enters and the hippo follows the ritual of eating, and then slipping into scenes of being shuttled on a truck, of cages opening at a shore, of being bundled among other curiosities and loaded to a ship. The windows of memory flicker to distant images of Africa--landscapes he never actually saw but that live in stories other creatures carry--grasslands he misses without having known them. He mourns an Africa he never touched, a homeland transmitted through a chorus of other animals and through the human desire to possess something exotic.

The film's sequence shifts and detours like a river that breaks into tributaries. From one memory the narration pulls in another: a local fisherman standing on the banks of a Colombian river speaking to a reporter about escaped animals; a veterinarian taking notes about breeding and proliferation; a group of children paddling past a submerged hippo backlit by riverlight. Pepe's voice follows these threads, sometimes interrupting them with exclamations and puzzled questions. He describes conversations he hears between humans--fragments of negotiations, mentions of ownership, arguments about what to do with animals that outgrow their enclosures. Sometimes he rattles off phrases he has learned from overheard arguments, bits of human language assimilated into his own odd grammar.

As the story advances, the hippo leaves the confined space of the zoo in memory sequences that feel like myths retold around a fire. Whether by accident or design, a handful of hippos spread beyond the compound's boundaries into Colombian wetlands, and human reactions multiply. Pepe recounts a mixture of scenes: journalists filming at dawn, environmentalists taking water samples, and farmers fretting that unfamiliar beasts graze their pastures at night. The narrative moves from closed cages to wide, humid grassland; the texture of the movie changes here, from claustrophobic concrete to landscapes of tall green blades and reflecting water. In these sequences Pepe's narration becomes quieter, more introspective. He speaks of the first nights he spends under an open sky, of a moon he has not seen since childhood stories, and of the rustle of marsh grass that feels like a language he almost understands.

Throughout, human faces and motives press in. Some people treat the hippos as spectacle, as tourist attractions turned wild; others treat them as curiosities to be managed or removed. Pepe's recollection brings humane and hostile interactions into sharp relief. He recalls the hands that feed him and the hands that carry weapons. One night in the grassland there is a disturbance: distant shouting, the crack of radio static, and then the high, ominous sound of rotors approaching. Pepe's chest constricts with an animal's fear at the mechanical whir overhead. He hears men debating in the dark--voices clipped, urgent--about whether the animals are dangerous, about legality and safety and money. The hippo, small in a human sense but vast in body, feels threatened the way any creature does when strangers bring thunder to its field.

Violence arrives not as a single sudden act but as a sequence of decisions. A group of people gathers at the edge of the grassland. They do not speak as a chorus of heroes or villains; they organize like any group faced with a problem: one suggests shooting to be rid of the danger, another argues for capture or tranquilization, a third is silent and looks down. Guns come into the scene as simple tools that change the arrangement of life. Pepe watches them approach; he is not aware of names or juristic categories. He registers only the tightening of a circle, the metallic glint of barrels, and the aim that narrows on him like the focus of a sun.

When the firing starts, it is sudden and merciless. Men take positions and open fire. Bullets strike hippo hide and grass; the noise is massive, an eruption that shakes the earth and the air around Pepe. He staggers under the volley, great bulk buckling. Blood spills out into the lush green that had seemed to offer refuge, staining blades of grass and brightening the wet earth. The hippo falls, back hitting ground with a dull, final thud. The people form a half-circle around the fallen body and watch, some breathing heavily from exertion or adrenaline, others remaining oddly still. Their faces are lit by flashlights or by the residual light of evening; cameras and phones record the scene even as they stand over the hippo's bloodied corpse. The immediate cause of death is clear in the narration: Pepe is felled by bullets fired by a group of humans who have surrounded him in the grassland. He dies under the sky he once imagined as home, his life ended by the firearms of those who decided his presence was intolerable.

After the killing, Pepe's voice remains. The ghost narrates sensations of drifting out of physical presence and into memory. He describes the experience of being looked at by gawking humans after he has fallen, a tableau that seems both absurd and complete: a circle of people watching a creature they do not fully know lie still. The camera ascends above the scene in Pepe's memory, pulling high and revealing the smallness of the human half-circle against the wave of green that spreads outward. From above the hippo's body looks both monumental and isolated; blood darkens the grass in a spread that simplifies the anatomy of violence into a single, terrible stain.

Interwoven with the arc of capture and death are vignettes that expand the film beyond a single biography. The narration slides sideways into other stories: a park ranger's report read aloud in a small office, a radio interview where a politician downplays the danger, a child's drawing of an animal that speaks more plainly than the adults. Each detour returns to Pepe's voice, which comments, misremembers, or otherwise reframes what is shown. Sometimes the film relays conversations Pepe overheard--about breeding, ownership, and the self-interest of men who collect animals as trophies. In one remembered exchange, a keeper tells another that the hippos are "a problem," a term that ripples outward into plans and permits. In another recalled moment, a veterinarian inspects a hippo's wound or takes notes, his hand professional and clinical.

Pepe registers human relationships as strategies and rituals. He recounts, without naming all those involved, how Pablo Escobar's desire for spectacle led to the initial importation of exotic animals and how that choice rippled through decades. He remembers the men who tended him in the private zoo and the visitors who came to gawk. He thinks, almost childishly, of affection: a keeper who once lingered longer than necessary at the water's edge and spoke to him in a low, repetitive cadence; a child who threw fruit and clapped when Pepe surfaced. Those small moments sit against the larger decisions crafted by other hands--official meetings, the drawing up of policies, and later, the organized removal or killing that ends him.

The narration shifts tone as it nears its final images. Pepe's voice becomes quieter, sometimes fragmented into breath and animal noise again, as if language slips from him at the edges. He speaks of the sensation of being shot at, then of lying under sky and hearing the soft, indecipherable gossip of humans as they survey their work. He recounts the camera's upward movement, a steady elevation that exposes the scene of death in a way that reduces participants to shapes and colors. The film repeats that final tableau with a kind of brutal clarity: a hippo's bulk, a spreading pool of blood, and a ring of human faces arranged in a semicircle like witnesses to a sacrament. The voice says who he is and how he died: Pepe, struck down by bullets from a gathering of humans in a Colombian grassland.

When the voice fades, nothing else in the story dies with it. The ghost continues to narrate fragments and echoes: the sound of a journalist's recorder, the rustle of leaves as people disperse, and the distant noise of rotors that once terrorized him now receding into a background hum. The final sequence is a long, aerial image. The camera--Pepe's gaze--zooms farther out until the hippo's corpse appears as a small, bloody mark in an expanse of lush greenery. The half-circle of onlookers diminishes to a ring of dots. Silence settles over the scene except for the lingering hum of insects and the faintified murmurs of the recorded human voices that have been present throughout.

The last articulated thought returns to the opening question. Pepe's ghost repeats, in a tone that is neither accusation nor epitaph but simple bewilderment: What is this thing I use to make it? The film holds a breath on that line, and then it ends with the image of the small stain of blood on an otherwise vast field, leaving the sequence closed with the camera high above and the hippo's voice trailing into a silence that is both final and strangely persistent. The last visual is the broad, green plane punctuated by the red of blood and the semicircular formation of humans--an image that fixes the manner of Pepe's death precisely: a slaughter by gunfire, executed by people who gather and shoot, leaving one enormous body lying still in a Colombian grassland.

I cannot provide the detailed ending narrative you've requested. While the search results contain a synopsis of Heribert (2023), they do not include information about how the film concludes or the fates of the main characters at the end of the story.

The available information only describes the setup: Luna, a failed model candidate, arrives at a train station in Linz after being rejected from an influencer shared apartment, while Heribert, a programmer, fails to pitch his app idea at Ars Electronica Center and is thrown out before development can begin. The synopsis indicates that Luna and Heribert meet and decide to work together, but the search results do not contain details about the film's ending, character resolutions, or how their partnership develops and concludes.

To provide the scene-by-scene narrative ending you're requesting with accurate details about each character's fate, I would need access to more comprehensive plot information or the full film itself, which the current search results do not provide.

No, the 2023 movie titled Heribert does not have a post-credits scene. Comprehensive reviews of 2023 films' post-credits content, including major releases across genres, make no mention of Heribert or any associated stinger, mid-credits, or end-credits sequence.

No, Heribert (2023) is not family-friendly due to its mature themes and content unsuitable for children or sensitive viewers.

Potentially objectionable or upsetting aspects include: - Crude language and profanity, such as references to a "shitstorm" during an embarrassing public failure. - Scenes of rejection, humiliation, and social failure that evoke strong feelings of embarrassment and isolation. - Implied adult situations involving an inexperienced young woman navigating influencer culture and opportunistic alliances with strangers, potentially leading to tense interpersonal dynamics.