Sound of Noise

Amadeus Warnebring comes from a great musical family and hates music; he has become a policeman and loves silence. In the city a group of six drummers begins staging actions: they perform a composition using an operating table in a hospital, the counting machines in a bank and construction equipment in the centre as their instruments. Warnebring runs the investigation and notices something strange: every instrument the group plays goes silent for him afterwards. Ola Simonsson and Johannes Stjärne Nilsson direct. The source is a short film the pair made earlier, about four people making rhythm out of the objects in a flat, which was widely watched online; the feature is that idea extended. The composition is genuinely played inside the film. Each action is a movement and the music is not assembled in the edit; the scenes are built on rhythm in real time and the camera movement is tied to it. The narrative proceeds in the shape of a detective story and the humour is dry, in the known Scandinavian register. The subject is the line between noise and music. The group sees the city as an orchestra and the film takes the idea seriously to the end. It screened in Critics' Week at the 2010 Cannes film festival. Who it is for: viewers who like music driven experimental comedy and Swedish cinema. Who it is not for: the plotting is thin, the characters are secondary, and the idea starts repeating itself after a while.