Indisputably this year’s best and most painful comedy, Force Majeure plays like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm filtered through the icy aesthetic sensibility of Michael Haneke, whose films could frankly benefit from the puckish sense of humour that Swedish writer/director Ruben Östlund displays here.
Taking place at a Swiss ski resort, Östlund’s film uses an avalanche as both catalyst and metaphor for a rift that billows into a full-blown marital crisis, as Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) flees on instinct from his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and two children as a (soon revealed to be) harmless cascade of snow approaches them.
For a while, this act of cowardice goes unremarked upon, and a period of silence following the incident (as well as a scene in which the two laugh together at nothing in particular), suggests Tomas’ tacit acknowledgement of his cowardice and Ebba’s forgiveness of it. This is, of course, until both start talking about it in the company of two other couples, and it’s revealed that Tomas is in deep denial about his actions, threatening to uproot their marriage’s foundation of mutual trust.
Force Majeure finds an endless source of cringey hilarity in its portrayal of masculinity as performance, but what makes the film so unnerving is its depiction of the extent to which any relationship is built on space for mutual projection – ignorance is bliss, after all – and susceptible to collapse from even the slightest spot on the blank canvas (this psychological space finds an effective correlative in the resort’s blinding white, omnipresent snow).
Östlund’s metaphors aren’t terribly subtle – in addition to that avalanche, there’s a child’s remote control toy plane that keeps veering off course – but his deployment of them is always self-effacingly funny, and his keen compositional eye complements the incisiveness of his observations on human behaviour. Capped off by a perfect provocation of an ending, designed to send you from the theatre in an anxious daze, it’s a film that could easily follow through on Östlund’s own facetious suggestion that he made the film to heighten society’s divorce rates.
4.5/5 stars
Force Majeure opens in cinemas on Thursday October 16.
