When I first wrote about Ruben Östlund it was 2014. Having been utterly floored by his brazen, original, and hilarious work, Force Majeure, I did something I rarely do: I zealously launched myself into the back-catalogue of the director. For a lot of cinephiles, this is an unremarkable course of action; ‘discovering’ a director and devouring their oeuvre is integral part of the cinephiliac’s diet. For me however, it wasn’t standard practice. Östlund had touched a rare nerve. Perhaps it was my Scandinavian one. Like many of his Scandinavian filmmaking brethren, Östlund’s film was disarmingly humanist; focusing on the everyday. It wasn’t interested in American-style superheroes or villains, nor sensationalist catastrophes, monsters, dystopian futures, plagues or zombies. Nor was it even interested in the penchants of more continental fare like psychological thrillers, social movements, politics, philosophy, or wartime history. Instead, it was just interested in people; proffering something simple and interpersonal that reflected us, the humans watching it, with truth, insight, and humour. Indeed, nothing really big happens in Force Majeure. I mean, one could say something happens from a basic scenario standpoint (there is an avalanche that fleetingly threatens to envelope a family), but the irony of the scenario is that nothing ultimately happens— the avalanche doesn’t touch them and no one gets hurt… at least physically. Yet the outcome of the ‘nothing’ is seismic: bruised egos, second guessing, gender role examinations, rampant discomfort, and the nagging sense that a couples’ mutual feelings (i.e. those for each other) will never be the same again. In short, it’s a tempest in a tea pot; the kind of film content one might associate with other great Scandinavian purveyors of human behaviour like Ingmar Bergman or Joachim Trier or Susanne Bier or many of the Dogme ’95 veterans of yore. Yet it was far funnier than most, and the form itself was uniquely methodological as well— pristine, sparing, graceful in its pacing, and often matching its content; as if another Scandinavian great, Roy Andersson, had entered the chat.

As I rummaged retroactively through his three previous features, The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), and Play (2011), one thing was could be easily ascertained: Force Majeure had been the funniest without question. Perhaps it took the confidence of a more mature filmmaker to lean so far into the sillies. However, beyond this more conspicuous point, stylistic and thematic consistencies were also embedded across the works; the films are largely premised on dilemma-based scenarios that escalate or get out of hand, wherein people feel paralysis or simply avoid taking action altogether. This is often depicted via moments of fight-or-flight, as exemplified by the central characters’ predicament in Force Majeure, but also more subtly in slow-burn scenarios with peripheral characters, like the mall employees in Play, who ignore the pleas of three young boys (in the midst of being bullied), not wanting to get involved.

Östlund’s second feature, Involuntary, is anthology of micro scenarios of this ilk, depicting situations ranging from the unsettling to, in some cases, the criminal. Yet even in the case of criminal scenes, Östlund’s are not those which regularly occur in mainstream cinema. Instead, they feel like ‘incidents’ ripped from quotidian life, where it’s easy to imagine how those who stood idly by when the incidents crossed a line would have much to answer for the next day, regardless of their legal culpability. In other words, they depict the kind of irresponsible (but impactful) life-incidents which are forever spoken of in a ‘hindsight is 20/20’ kind of way. The most jarring of these in Involuntary is a scene of sexual assault, where four (male) friends walk pleasantly along a rural road before one begins to tease another that he’s going to ‘suck’ him. The adult men cackle like little boys egging each other on, until the inevitable awkward silence after the one man has been forced to the ground and the un-consented sex act has been briefly performed. The next day, mired in a stew of humiliation and denial, the victim tells his girlfriend what happened. She, of course, is incredulous to the incident. She simply can’t believe that no one would say anything, do anything, or think that what the others chalked up to a ‘joke’ is somehow funny. Naturally, she’s right— it isn’t funny. Yet Östlund has successfully constructed a plausible depiction of the social dynamics at play which allowed for such an organic (and unacceptably criminal) escalation in the first place. It’s as if Östlund found the magic wand to cinematically manifest the lesson from the apologue of the ‘frog in the pot’; drop a frog into boiling water and it will immediately clamber out. Put it in tepid water and slowly increase the heat— the frog will eventually boil. It may seem nonsensical in hindsight (to outsiders) that the frog wouldn’t get out of a boiling pot (or, in the Involuntary example, that no one would have put a halt to the situation), but by playing the situation out in real time, Östlund reminds us that the ends of a situation are not always self-evident to those involved as they occur; during awkward or uncomfortable moments in life, threats are not always taken seriously, insofar as executive decision-making can be slow; the brain constantly fires to reassess things, dismissing much out of self-preserving anxiety, while looking for more concrete cues (or leadership) from others. In realizing such a scenario so incisively, not only does Östlund illustrate how things in life can get painfully out of hand, but he effectively inculcates the unwitting audience as paralyzed bystanders in the incident.

To formally optimize this uncomfortable degree of witness, Östlund filmed the scene as a single take from a static wide master shot. It’s a technique he frequently invokes to give the audience the sense that (like a bystander) they’re locked in, unable to look away. Play employed this technique in nearly every scene (most were one-shot vignettes), confining the audience to its bystander position in shots like one on a tram, wherein we watch a scene of bullying play out in real time with no cuts. The camera, locked-off, aims straight down the barrel towards the back of the tram, playing witness as a group of five boys bully a passenger and then are descended upon by three older lads who, in turn, give them a beating and throw them off the tram one by one. Other passengers, initially frozen in paralysis, look on, switch seats, and remain silent in self-preservation mode, hoping to avoid being dragged into the situation.

This technique is perhaps best exemplified by Östlund’s short film, Incident by a Bank (2009), as the entire film occurs in one of these shots. In it, the audience is reflexively afforded two avatar bystanders in the foreground who watch a potential robbery unfold across the street. As the hapless crooks arrive and enter the bank, most of the action of the robbery itself remains unseen, as Östlund never cuts away from the extreme wide shot outside. Moreover, since he lets the robbery play out in real time, we’re left to makes sense of what is happening along with our two bystanders, who are initially paralyzed with uncertainty and bemusement. Could this be a real robbery? No. Could it? Is this happening? Maybe it is. So what do we do? With no higher power around, answers do not come quickly, despite the whole incident playing out in front of them in about ten minutes. It’s the kind of real-life situation that happens in a relative snap but slows down forever in one’s memory. Indeed, it must have slowed down for Östlund, as on multiple occasions he’s relayed that the inspiration for the film came from a real (attempted) bank robbery he once witnessed across the street from him in Stockholm[1].

Given his artistic predilection for self-reflection, it’s clear Östlund isn’t overly critical of his characters for their situational ineptitudes. Instead, he seems to have great empathy for human failings, even when making fun of them. That may come as a surprise for many viewers of Östlund. After all, he repeatedly depicts characters who don’t do the prescribed ‘right’ thing, or who act ignobly when they should act heroically to intercede in situations. Indeed, it isn’t unusual for critics to feel Östlund is admonishing characters, or for some viewers to appreciate (or not) his movies based on which direction they think he’s wagging his finger. His international breakthrough, Force Majeure, is a great case in point. Part of the more mainstream appeal was just how funny the film was, as mentioned. But the other was how it coincided with the cause-du-jour or zeitgeist; the popular perception of the film being primarily a searing takedown of ‘fragile masculinity.’ In it, a father on a ski trip bolts a table when the aforementioned avalanche looks to be upon his family at lunch (whereas the mother stays to protect the kids). As the proverbial dust settles, both he and his wife (more so than the kids) struggle to reconcile his self-saving impulse with his gendered role(s) as a husband, father, and man. To be sure, there is a lot of laughter generated by the father’s deconstruction (and attempted reconstruction) of his male ego. Yet, apparently the same critics never saw the last scene wherein the mother does virtually the same thing, fleeing a bus without her children as it dangerously peters along a steep cliff. Had they have kept the film rolling this far, they may have stumbled onto Östlund’s true impetus for the scenario— which was to do with gendered expectations and how those function in relation to fight-or-flight survivor instincts. In short, there is a societal expectation, or implicit social contract, that men should be heroic in a moment of life or death; keeping calm, carrying on, and uttering instructions like ‘women and children first’ (which, unmistakably, is exactly what the father’s friend says to get other passengers safely off the bus after the mom bolts). Yet in any random moment of panic, no individual on earth (no matter where they land on the gender spectrum) knows how they’ll react. Sure, the protagonist’s shame at not living up to the masculine ideal is hilarious, but the protagonist didn’t come up with those gendered ideals, he just has to face up to the fact he didn’t match them. Perhaps more importantly, his wife needs to decide if she can ever look at him the same way again. Indeed, Östlund, in interviews, mentioned that the genesis of the film’s idea came from two main sources: a stat he read suggesting that after plane hijackings, divorce goes up, presumably because husbands don’t act like Bruce Willis in front of their wives, and another more personal story from a couple he knew, wherein a store that the two were shopping at in Manila was held-up by an armed militia and the husband instinctively hit the deck instead of jumping in front of his wife or foiling the armed robbery[2][3]. Big (relationship) mistake.

Thus, for Östlund, Force Majeure is clearly not a case of him condemning a nebulous concept like masculinity out of principal, it’s more of a display of humanistic empathy through finding humour in a character failing to live up to societal expectations. In this sense, Östlund has a humouristic kinship with someone like Larry David, whose Seinfeld avatar George infamously once ate an eclair out of a garbage can. Larry wasn’t moralizing against George, because in real life Larry did infamously eat an eclair out of the garbage. Indeed, humans not meeting the expectations of society can not only be very funny, but if we’re honest with ourselves about our own capacity for failing to live up to them, seeing these sorts of scenarios breeds empathy for others and perhaps some forgiveness of our authentic selves. Östlund’s methods may come off a little more sardonic, but that’s just the Scandinavian way.

Regardless of interpretations, Force Majeure certainly found its champions, winning a Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard category at the Cannes Film Festival and becoming Sweden’s entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars. However, it failed to earn the Academy’s nomination. As the story often goes, it can take a while before people fully embrace an artist. There are seemingly stages to realizing just how good certain artwork is, often starting with a familiarity of the artist themselves. Thus, despite the film being –without question- a masterpiece, no one seemed ready for Östlund to make a masterpiece. They simply didn’t know him yet. Hence, Force Majeure didn’t take its rightful place as the best film of the year, though it did play its part in alerting people to Östlund and set the stage for whatever he was going to do next. And that ‘next’ was The Square (2017).

If Force Majeure’s boldness in thematics and humour was a sign of Östlund’s burgeoning confidence as a filmmaker to take bigger swings, then perhaps The Square should have come as no surprise. It continued Östlund’s modus operandi of long-take shots and cordoning off its audience and characters in uncomfortable dilemmas, yet Östlund put a spin on his own formula, inverting things almost from the get-go. The Square begins with an incident; a classic scenario like most of Östlund’s work, where the protagonist, Christian (Claes Bang), is a bystander to an apparent mugging-in-progress. Like many pedestrians around him, we can see his mind trying to process his personal threat-level in real time while hoping the responsibility for action doesn’t fall upon him. However, as the threat increases, he is dragged into the situation by another bystander. Forced to ‘man up,’ the two work successfully together, and with the adrenaline still pumping, he feels a boost to his fight-or-flight agency (a comedic inversion of the father in Force Majeure). This is short-lived however, as he quickly realizes the scenario was just an elaborate ruse to pilfer his wallet. Nevertheless, there is a knock-on effect where Christian, egged on by his subordinates at a fine art gallery, engages in further assertive action despite his natural risk-averse tendencies. Ironically (and cleverly on the part of Östlund), taking the side of ‘fight’ in this fight-or-flight scenario doesn’t help Christian any more than fleeing did for the father in Force Majeure, as by pressing the issue it brings him into conflict with a young immigrant boy who, under the guise of getting in trouble with his parents, threatens to make chaos for Christian’s life. Despite the boy posing no real physical danger, the conflict throws Christian out of his natural rhythm, creating a domino effect whereby he becomes negligent at work and haphazardly ‘ok’s a disastrous ad campaign which eventually leads to his own (forced) stepping down. In short, his life becomes chaos.

In the midst of this is one of Östlund’s most startling standalone scenes of fight-or-flight bystanderism. As the film is set primarily in the bourgeois world of high art, there is a scene in which a performance artist is brought into a black-tie gala to entertain guests by acting like a chimpanzee. The high class dinner guests are told that the ‘animal’ can smell fear and will attack if anyone tries to escape, but if they sit perfectly still they can be safe in the ‘herd’ knowing that someone else will be victimized instead. With this self-preservation metaphor clearly spelled out, the ‘performance’ begins, with the performer (Terry Notary) doing an uncanny channeling of a chimp; at first being playful and lulling the guests into the performance, then becoming more terrorizing as he chases the ‘alpha’ artist (Dominic West) out of the room. With the alpha male gone, he then beings to harass a female who, in turn, asks for her male partner’s help. Yet he stays motionless in a bid to save himself. However, once the chimp-man wrenches her to the ground and begins to physically assault her, another man finally jumps up amid her screams to try and help. As soon as he does, the floodgates open and more and more men gang up, turning the meek herd into an angry mob; the civilized into beasts; the preyed-upon into vigilantes… poised to rip the performer limb from limb.

While the sequence is a show-stopper —one of the pinnacle exposés of human behaviour ever set to fiction film— it was perhaps the last (and much more muted) scene of The Square that pointed to the direction of Östlund’s subsequent opus. As Christian steps down from his position at the gallery after the backlash to the ad campaign he haphazardly ‘ok’d for the square (within The Square), he is chastised by some critics for intentionally trying to stir controversy and, by others, for giving in to self-censorship. Of course, Christian wasn’t attempting either, he was simply preoccupied with the chaos of his life that befell him after he was ushered into action during a fight-or-flight situation. Nevertheless, through the diametrically opposite criticisms thrown at his lead, Östlund showcases not only the oft misguided contemporary protocols of popular cancellations and public apologies, but how nearly everything floated in modern media becomes an instant lightning rod for polarized controversy, no matter how unintended. In this way, Östlund utilizes dialectics to build his commentary, a little like how his final scene of Force Majeure complicated what came before it in order to say something more nuanced. With this finale, the stage was set then for class, gender, and hierarchical order to be put through the dialectical wringer in his following film— 2021’s, The Triangle of Sadness.

The film, Östlund’s biggest swing yet, is broken into three parts: the first focusing on the gender dynamics of a couple: Yaya (the late Charlbi Dean) and Carl (Harris Dickenson). Carl, the now-typical Östlund archetype of a somewhat weak-kneed, mild-mannered man, is a male model by trade who, in what could be another Larry David-esque scenario, digs too deep into the minutia of a social interaction with Yaya over dinner, wherein she clearly obliges him to pay the bill at an expensive restaurant by pretending not to notice the waiter set it down. Carl can’t help himself and belabours the point again and again throughout the evening, leaving Yaya embarrassed, resentful, exhausted, and eventually more candid, insofar as she finally admits both her manipulation of the situation and her ultimate expectations for their relationship, which are apparently for it to be short-lived, as her realist outlook on a patriarchal world infers that her best card to play for the good life (i.e. her ephemeral beauty) positions her to become a trophy wife, and poor Carl, who as a male model obviously gets paid less, is only a good temporary match for her, as despite their pairing boosting her social-media engagement, he simply doesn’t offer enough long-term security. Carl, somewhat naively, extolls his modern ideals of social equity amongst opposite-sex partners and how this should manifest in split bills. As his ideals are not transactional (at least, in his mind), he proffers a romantic and lasting love that will eventually win Yaya over, despite her pessimism.

Part Two of Triangle takes place on a yacht for the super rich. Carl and Yaya, having been gifted the vacation as influencers, are surrounded by the likes of Russian oligarchs and Western weapons-makers. The segment carries hallmarks of a classic upstairs-downstairs satire, with the yacht’s hierarchy being transparently on display. At the top, the guests can do anything they please (save for the caveat of being overruled by the drunken marxist Captain). Next down the totem are the guest-relations crew (mainly caucasian) who are told to always say ‘yes’ with the goal of acquiring as many tips as possible. They sit both literally and figuratively atop the below-deck crew of cleaners and kitchen staff (mainly people of colour) whom they can order around as needed. In a domino-effect event à la The Square, at one point on the whim of a champaign-swilling oligarch, the crew is forced to water-slide off the boat into the sea, including the kitchen staff, who warn that the food they’re preparing will go off if they’re forced to leave their station. Later, during the formal occasion of the ‘Captain’s Dinner’ amid rough seas, virtually every passenger gets violently ill except for the captain (who’s eaten an off-menu hamburger) and one of the oligarchs who seems to ingest nothing but alcohol. The two men then engage in a friendly ‘which is better’ war-of-words about Marxism vs Capitalism. Cleverly, this seesaw between them is not-only visually echoed in the ship’s lurching, but acts as a major transitional fulcrum between Parts Two and Three, insofar as Part Two had been a satire of extreme capitalism, Part Three sees select members of the ship become penniless castaways on an island, effectively emulating a marxist washing away of property and capital. In short, it’s a return to the communitarian primordial beginnings of humankind, where the guests, ship’s crew, and even a pirate are rendered the same… at least initially.

Like his chimp-scene in The Square, Part Three is another beautifully incisive display of human behaviour. At first, the guests and the remaining two crew members (an above-deck guest manager and below-deck cleaner) attempt to keep a semblance of their erstwhile statuses on the boat. However, with no practical skills and no bartering power afforded to their last remnants of material things (like Rolexes), they all slowly realize their statuses are no longer valid. This becomes evident when the lowest castaway on the pecking order, the below-deck cleaner Abigail (played brilliantly by Dolly De Leon), is able to display her life-saving skills of fishing and making fire. As Paula, the above-deck guest manager, patronizingly attempts to order Abigail to dole out her catch, Abigail realizes that in this razed, back-to-basics world, her practical skills have become invaluable enough to the point of rendering her supreme within the group. Indeed, she is the only person who isn’t expendable, and thus she has ironically become the most high-status islander, flipping the hierarchy on its head. She even verbalizes this point by making everyone repeat that on the island: she is the captain. Once this is clear, the castaways fall in line, reversing the pecking order and doing whatever they can to obsequiously gain Abigail’s favour. Yaya flatters Abigail by praising her for ‘turning things into a matriarchy,’ and even the capitalist Russian oligarch (who has now begun to quote Marx) tries to make himself useful by shining a flashlight in front of Abigail’s feet as she steps in the dark.

Ironically, Carl, who in the patriarchal world was paid less for his beauty than Yaya, now finds his fortunes reversed in the matriarchal one, with the currency of his beauty affording him new opportunities when he notices that Abigail has taken a shine to him. To live his best life, he becomes a proverbial trophy husband, which begets mockery and scorn from the other male castaways, but also brings him special status and practical luxuries like extra food, as well as a roof over his head (in a washed-up submersible that Abigail sleeps in). As things become increasingly uncomfortable for Carl with Yaya, he meekly attempts to emotionally manipulate Abigail into wedging Yaya out of the picture. Abigail takes the bait to assure Carl his protected status, so when Yaya proposes a hike to the other side of the island to look for signs of life, Abigail offers to join, ready to make good on her assurances. However, Yaya does miraculously stumble across the signs of a resort thanks to an elevator carved into a rock face. Before they take it (and therefore initiate the presumed rescuing of the castaways and a return to their previous lives), Abigail says she needs a moment to relieve herself amongst the cliffs, where she can be seen to grapple with the realization of how this will also mean a return to her bottom-feeder status. This is affirmed in a comment by Yaya, who suggests that Abigail could come ‘work for her’ as an assistant once the ordeal is all over. Abigail, now with flashing eyes, approaches Yaya from behind with a heavy rock… What’s next is left largely to our imaginations as we cut to black.

Hence, just as Part Two skewered the follies of extreme capitalism for its delusion, waste, hierarchal servitude, unfairness, indignities, corruptibility, and perverse inversion of useable skills, Part Three skewered the follies of extreme marxist communitarianism for its impracticality, corruptibility, hierarchal servitude (in practice), and hostility to upward social mobility and good fortune.

By almost every measure, Triangle was Östlund’s biggest success to date. It was his second film in a row to win the venerated Palme d’Or at Cannes, it was nominated for three Academy Awards (compared to The Square’s one) including the prestigious categories of Best Picture and Best Director, and it brought in more money at the box office than any of his other films. That said, the box office tally was a mere $26.1 million, only good enough to place 89th on the list of the top grossing films of the year[4]. Indeed, while Östlund’s peers were now clearly ready to recognize him for achievement at the highest level of the craft, he remained far from a household name, with mainstream success continuing to allude him.

Perhaps it was a sign that Östlund’s films had merely hit the ceiling of popular appeal for arthouse work. After all, the films are dense, original, and don’t quite fit into to any genre. That makes them inherently tricky to market, as the most successful films in the last fifteen years have been sequels, reboots, or based on intellectual property. This implies that an important part of a film’s immediate success is that the audience is already familiar with the material beforehand. In other words, viewers know what to expect. This speaks to the opposite of originality, or the experience of engaging with something new. Indeed, the idea of ‘fan service’ has become a primary creative driver in studio rollouts. Audiences are not to be challenged, but catered to. Not matching expectations is a no-no. And Östlund’s films cannot match expectations, as no one seems to know what to expect from them. Even if they skewed towards genre, that would make things easier from a marketing perspective, as genres are inherently structured on formulas. For instance, one can have certain expectations when going to see a horror film or a western. But Östlund’s films aren’t based on predetermined genre formulas, so any interest in going to see them is rooted in more niche concerns, like people being well-read about cinema (e.g. knowing that a film has done well critically or at festivals like Cannes), or basing their interest on the director’s earlier works, or stumbling across trailers and being open-minded enough to gamble their time and money on intrigue alone. Yet these are hardly the most common reasons to see films, especially in North America, where having famous actors is seen as an important precursor to eliciting box office success and distribution.

However, extrapolating Östlund’s ideas and giving them the Hollywood makeover doesn’t necessarily work either. In 2020, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell starred in an American remake of Force Majeure, entitled Downhill. Catering to Hollywood’s expectations of a comedy, the film was over half an hour shorter than the original, making it (presumably) quick and painless; taking away any duration-intimidation for those apprehensive of longer movies. Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus’s casting also signalled to the audience what to expect— it’s a comedy. Don’t think too hard. You should laugh. This was a significant change from the original film, where viewers wouldn’t necessarily know they were in for a comedy when the film began; the actors played it straight, so the humour was generated from how uncomfortable and awkward the scenario was. Predictably, in the American version, where the actors were cast because they’re ‘funny,’ the film can’t help itself but to allow them to ‘do their thing’ by indulging in what feels like ad lib, as well as adding scenes contrived to sew up comedic buttons. For example, Ferrell’s character has a special toque that he’s warned against wearing without a helmet lest he hit his head… Let’s just say it doesn’t take a brain surgeon to guess where this is going to go. There are also characters added just to be ‘hilarious,’ like the European hotel manager (played by Australian, Miranda Otto), who is like a cartoon of bygone European stereotypes: oversexed, uncomfortably direct, over-the-top in fashion, etc., compared to the chaste, square, and ‘normal’ American characters. This is somewhat ironic however, as by wanting to remake the film, the American producers must have seen the European original, wherein Europeans are depicted as they see themselves: introverted, muted in fashion, cold, etc. Regardless, the American producers chose instead to play into hackneyed stereotypes for their audience to have a cheap laugh at the other. More elements of the plot and theme are spoon-fed for the American audience as well, even when depicting the same scenes as the original. For instance, when the father carries the mother down the hill near the end, Louis-Dreyfus is given new expository dialogue to explain to Ferrell (and to us, the audience) what is happening and why she’s going along with it. In Östlund’s film, we’re expected to piece together that moment for ourselves, with the dialogue never occurring. It’s a more typical arthouse approach which trusts in the intelligence of the audience. The American version also does something different with the ending. Whereas in the original, there was the aforementioned scene of the mother fleeing the treacherous bus, in Downhill, as Louis-Dreyfus and Ferrell are departing the hotel and saying goodbye to their friends, a huge chunk of snow falls from the awning above their heads; all parties instinctively scatter, including Louis-Dreyfus, who shares a look with Ferrell afterwards conveying an affirmation that indeed, maybe scattering in a moment of peril is fairly instinctive after all. To the filmmakers’ credit, this is far more economical than Östlund’s longer ending. However, it doesn’t allow for the humorous irony of the men calling for ‘women and children first’ to vacate the bus, nor does it give us what Östlund must have thought was an important last moment in his film, wherein we see the father initially decline the invitation of a cigarette from a stranger, then change his mind and take one, smoking in front of his son for the first time. When the son asks, “do you smoke, dad?” and the father replies, “yes, I do,” it’s a sign not only of his new-found self-acceptance, but of overcoming the fear of transgressing the expectations imposed upon him by society.

Despite all the Hollywood-style tweaks in content, the filmmaker(s) did try in vain to maintain a semblance of the original’s arthouse formalisms. Yet the mix of tones didn’t quite work for audiences. The film fared terribly at the box office, which perhaps was no surprise. After all, who was it for? Anyone of the cinephile persuasion probably saw the original, so there was really no point in seeing a (presumably) reductive remake, especially with such predictable changes to the very elements that made Force Majeure so great in the first place. Therefore, it must have been for people unacquainted with Östlund’s work who were only interested in the famous funny actors. In which case, the mix of tones was a fairly odd choice, because why not just lean-in and make it an outright comedy? Why even bother trying to keep some of the arthouse-isms, especially for audiences who don’t normally show monetary support for art cinema? In short, it was a remake for no reason that nobody asked for. It wasn’t better than the original, and more crucially, it wasn’t funnier than the original either. The critics agreed, with the film being almost invariably panned. Even aggregator sites like Rotten Tomatoes noted the dive in cinematic prowess from Östlund’s original[5].

Interestingly, while Östlund himself has generally fared better with critics, they too can struggle with him. For instance, despite the displays of love for Östlund at the peer-review level (Palme d’Or, Academy Award nominations, et al.), Triangle of Sadness was not universally loved by any means. From left-leaning publications like The New Yorker, to right-leaning publications like the National Review, Östlund and his film were dismissed as everything from superficial, to facile, to arrogant; all ironic adjectives for a film that skewers superficiality, is more nuanced and dialectical than just about anything on offer, and doesn’t propose a superiority of any ideological view by the director. Hence, many of the negative responses must have been provoked by the personal vexation of those reviewing it. In other words, perhaps certain critics felt caught-up in the skewering. This isn’t unlikely. When one makes fun of a sea of people, one casts a wide net to catch defensiveness. Moreover, some critics may not even see past their own biases and affiliations. Just as some viewers of Force Majeure couldn’t see the complexities of the film beyond their preferred understanding of it as a one-noted skewering of fragile masculinity, Armand White of the conservative National Review seemingly couldn’t get past the skewering of capitalists in Triangle, calling the film ‘Euro-Marxist,’ despite the film also skewering Marxism[6]. It’s no wonder then that out of spite he also accused Östlund of being a misanthrope before trying to warn his readers that no one should confuse Östlund’s talents with those of Kubrick’s[7].

It’s a funny comparison in many ways, as Kubrick, no matter how sacrosanct he now is, was never universally loved in his day either. Classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), A Clockwork Orange (1971), and Dr.Strangelove (1964), were all derided as often as they were praised upon release, with many of the same epithets and adjectives now reserved for Östlund being hurled at Kubrick. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, as Östlund and Kubrick do indeed have much in common. Their films display a high degree of intelligence (which always irritates people), there is a visible and (somehow) visceral feeling of perfectionism to their works, there is often a nihilistic and/or ironic sense of humour, and despite their respective thematic proclivities as directors, each one of their films feels like a roguish singularity, defying mainstream tastes and expectations. Moreover, like Kubrick, it seems that the only demographic to unabashedly love Östlund is: filmmakers. Indeed, Östlund remains a filmmaker’s filmmaker. However, as with Kubrick, this may change as future audiences look back in hindsight with 20/20 vision, recognizing and appreciating the very qualities about his works that Kubrick’s also share. Östlund’s audience may grow too, just as Kubrick’s did. As the accolades (and awards) from his peers continue to add up, Östlund is more likely to attract bigger name actors, which in turn might certainly bring new eyes to his work at the box office. Indeed, his next announced work, The Entertainment System is Down (2026), has drawn his biggest star power to date, including Keanu Reeves, Kirsten Dunst, and Samantha Morton. It’ll be Östlund’s best chance to convey his unique vision of cinema to a wider audience on his own terms (i.e. not Hollywood’s), and find new fans to raise the status of his oeuvre, as no-doubt there will be many who begin to dive into his back-catalogue… just as I once did.

It will come as no surprise then that I personally think this recognition is long overdue. When I first wrote about him back in 2014, it already seemed clear that Östlund had not-only made a masterwork, but was displaying talent at the highest heights of the art form. His two films since, The Square and The Triangle of Sadness, have not dissuaded me of that notion, nor seemingly his peers in the industry. Instead, depending how The Entertainment System is Down fares, one might even venture further now to say that Östlund is at the precipice of a new level of filmmaker status, where he could be widely recognized as one of the finest filmmakers alive, if not the very best arthouse filmmaker outright; the Kubrick of his generation. However, regardless of his stature, I would only add one amendment to what I had written a short decade ago. I had called his, ‘the cinema of the bystander,’ but I’ll proffer this simple clarification— his is the cinema of ‘radical empathy for the bystander.’ For it takes empathy to accept that no matter how hard we might try when faced with dilemmas (from whence there are no good options), we all fail pretty regularly. Pointing out the humour in that isn’t an arrogant attack nor a moralizing lesson. It’s reflective, humanist, and just good fun.

Indeed, Östlund isn’t a misanthrope. He’s just Scandinavian.