Force Majeure (2014)

Lo! High in the mountains, snow and ice, a family settles into a hotel. Although it should be the time of their lives, a brooding unease gradually unravels the family until husband and wife are in a state of ruin. Name that film. It’s The Shining! Correct. It’s also Force Majeure and the long shots of the winding road up to the hotel suggest Ostlund noticed this. Also the pace, and the excellent, somewhat Kubrickian totalitarian cinematic control, privileging frosty perfection to give it a sense of being seen through God’s eye of judgement. Adjectives that occur to me are “stern” and “unwavering” because of that implacably damning steadiness of gaze. 

For its central setpieces, the film downplays eye-candy visual moments in favour of long dialogue scenes that feel like the kind of play that makes you hold your breath a bit. Fairly quickly it becomes an excruciating film, like a scroogish embarrassment-comedy demanding a higher price for the laughs. It's sour but not squalid. Outside of those cramped claustrophobic rooms of people chatting, the film is visually outstanding, not only vistas of the snowy mountains (admittedly, you’d better not fuck that up) but just people walking down a hotel hallway or the repeated shot of the couple talking on the walkway outside their room that turns an actual hotel into something that looks interestingly fake and designed because it’s such a knowingly perfectly framed stage. Ostlund loves the sheer movieness of a conspicuously composed shot, and matches it with brilliant control of tone and dialogue. The cast are amazing, and they balance out the mannered visuals since all the character interactions are expertly done with the kind of noticeable yet casual micro-naturalism that Scandinavian films often excel at. That “real people talking” acting style enhances the artificiality of the visual style by making the latter feel like a purposeful choice rather than just an undifferentiated mannerism, and it is also particularly useful here to ramp up our discomfort with how unbearable the emotionally repressed-but-only-just confrontations are. In its own way, the film has the contrived tension of Hitchcock. But even more than Hitch, there’s a cold meanness in Ostlund’s toying with the audience, making us suffer through the situation but cannily giving us the option to laugh, our own survival mechanism faced with the stress of the scenes before us. This is, as noble but rushed newspaper critics put it so well, pitch-black comedy. Noble but languorous academics might prefer to call it tragi-comedy. 

Infinitely niche as it is, the tragi-comedy genre gives directors and authors unrivalled latitude in their endings. Ostlund goes for a final torment. The last shot of the film leaves us wincing in frustration from the entirely unearned smugness of a facial expression and slight swagger of a walk that tells us any possible personal development, any maturing of relations, has been lost to a new petty victory that can be leveraged for a lifetime.