Review by Jenny Priestley
Stars Villmar Björkman, Linnea Cart-Lamy, Leif Edlund, Sara Eriksson, Lola Ewerlund, Olle Liljas, Maria Lundqvist, Cecilia Milocco, Simeon Nordius, Henrik Vikman, Vera Vitali
Written by Erik Hemmendorff & Ruben Östlund
Certification UK 15 | Sweden Btl
Runtime 98 minutes
Directed by Ruben Östlund
Swedish films seem to be the new in thing at the box office these days. Well, Involuntary couldn't be further away from Dragon Tattoo and Let The Right One In if it tried. Director Ruben Ostlund's film follows five stories of social embarrasment: a righteous school teacher, a group of male friends, two teenage girls, a birthday party and a situation on a coach trip.
Each story offers up an embarrasing situation and each time no one speaks up to question what is happening. Watching the film I found it made me ask questions of myself and at times I felt awkward to be watching these people in the situations they were in. This isn't meant to be a negative. In fact, I felt as if I was eavesdropping on conversations I shouldn't. This is mostly down to Ostlund's uncomprising camerawork. Every scene is shot from one camera in one static location and there's very little inter-cutting between actors as they're delivering lines. At times the camera is stationed quite far from where the action is happening or even remains fixed on one point while dialogue is delivered from characters completely out of shot. But I didn't find that to be a problem, in fact I found it meant I concentrated on the story more and, as I said, it raised questions for me over the whole concept of voyeurism.
Don't expect a nice wrap up at the end, all of these stories are singular and none of the characters are connected (which I liked). The stand out bit for me involved probably the best known member of the cast Maria Lundqvist who plays a well-known actress travelling on a public coach and having to deal with fans during the journey. That's actually not the storyline of her segment but I found rather it amusing and would have liked Ostlund to have explored a bit more. Overall, I found this to be a good piece of intelligent filmmaking which asks questions of its audience. It's not going to set the box office alight but it is worth seeing.