Involuntary

Five separate stories run without touching each other. At a birthday party the host is injured and says nothing so as not to spoil the mood. A bus driver refuses to move until whoever broke a curtain rail owns up. Two teenage girls take photographs. A group of men do something on holiday and one of them does not want to be part of it. The subject is not the events but group pressure. In every section someone stays silent about something they know is wrong; being embarrassed looks more frightening than objecting. The form is extremely rigid: the camera is fixed, the takes are long, and the most important action often stays outside the frame. You see legs instead of faces; you hear the incident without seeing it. Ruben Östlund deliberately leaves the viewer with incomplete information. The method he would later carry into Force Majeure and The Square is already in place here: a social rule breaks and nobody knows what to do. It screened in Un Certain Regard at Cannes. Who it is for: viewers who like social discomfort comedy and formal rigour. Who it is not for: anyone wanting closure; most of the stories end without resolving.