A well-to-do Swedish family are on a ski vacation and everything is going swimmingly until a near-avalanche over lunch causes emotional destruction, despite no one actually being physically hurt. As the ‘controlled’ avalanche hurtles towards the restaurant, wife and mother Ebba’s (Lisa Loven Kongsli) instinct is to protect her children. When she calls for husband Thomas (Johannes Kuhnke) to help, he’s legging it and the only precious cargo he’s carrying out of there is his phone and gloves.
Post-avalanche everything crumbles – Ebba’s sanity, her relationship with Thomas, the family vacation – and it even snowballs onto their friend Mats’ relationship with his much younger girlfriend. The tension-inducing Summer Finale from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons becomes a constant interjection, but thankfully all aggrieved characters do get a chance to redeem themselves. Before they reach any sort of redemption however, the male characters come completely undone, and while you don’t want to laugh at these men at their most vulnerable, you also can’t really help it.
Shot against a breathtaking mountainous backdrop, the focus lies in the subtlety of the characters trying to come to grips with a situation where no external damage was done. Part moral-dilemma drama, part dark comedy, Force Majeure tackles masculinity, instinct and how the two are not necessarily connected.
In cinemas 16 Oct
