Force Majeure

A controlled avalanche is triggered during lunch at a French Alps resort. When the powder cloud comes toward the terrace, Tomas grabs his phone and runs while his wife Ebba stays with the children. Nobody is hurt, and the marriage ends inside those few seconds. Ruben Östlund fed the script from YouTube. The logic is explicit: if someone caught an event on camera and uploaded it, it happened in real life, so it can happen in this film. The bus evacuation scene comes straight from a viral clip titled Idiot Spanish bus driver almost kills students. It played Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2014 and won the Jury Prize. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 94 percent from 165 reviews. Sweden submitted it for the 87th Academy Awards and it did not advance past the shortlist, which was seriously argued about on the festival circuit that year. An English-language remake, Downhill, arrived in 2020 with Will Ferrell and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, taking a more conventionally comic approach. Who it is for: viewers who like social embarrassment used as suspense. Who it is not for: anyone wanting resolution. The film does not forgive its characters and leaves the reconciliation deliberately suspect.