User Reviews

I'll grant you that I am not a Foreign Film Critic, but I do watch a lot of Foreign made films, subbed, dubbed, and English. This was not a very good film in my opinion. Swedish films are typically the most difficult to digest, but this one was beyond my enjoyment.

I found it interesting that the opening scene and the final scene are the same, because I felt that it acknowledged that the film went nowhere.

Sadly for as much screen time as the main characters had, there was little or no development. Within the first few moments of each characters screen appearance you will know as much about them as you will by the end of the film. There is some change in the intensity of the main character, but the whole of his personality is laid out before you in those first few minutes.

As for "resolution". Forget about it. It IS possible to have closure in a film without it being formulaic. In fact that takes a more thoughtful script writing than just leaving the audience hanging at the end.

I can not recommend this film.

It seems like the story writers sat down and said: Let's make a film about the country side dystopia of Sweden. Well, they did. They filled it with all the most obvious clichés.

The daughter of a religious family. The violent son of a violent man with a bad reputation. Racism, poverty, alcoholism and all the normal stuff.

Fine, that can make a good story IF it's directed in a good way and if the actors are least some steps out of class 1 for actors. The acting is absolutely awful and that becomes very obvious when you have Swedish as your mother language. The directing is as blunt and bleak as directing can ever be and basically anyone with a tiny little bit of skill could've made miracles compared to the result Dansk Skalle brought forward.

If a little bit of time and imagination had been used to give the characters some depth the story had been given another dimension, but it's a total void in that sector. What you is what you get and it's all extremely shallow. In a movie of this length there's plenty of time for giving the characters some sort of an identity and profile, but I can't see any serious attempts for doing so.

The story itself is badly structured and the end totally illogical and pointless. Frustration of being a looser without a future, sure, but killing your friends without reason is a completely different thing.

I was completely flabbergasted when I saw this film was nominated for an award, and almost equally so when I found out the movie almost got a 5 star rating here on IMDb. 5 is way too high as there's absolutely no quality in this movie. In any way.