Involuntary – review

This confident Swedish directorial debut is much influenced by the brilliant deadpan satires of Östlund's compatriot Roy Andersson that cut between a number of storylines using long takes and a static camera. Östlund interweaves five narrative strands: a middle-aged, middle-class host of a dinner party is injured by a firework but refuses to get treatment; a bus-driver stops at a lay-by until someone confesses to breaking a curtain rail in the lavatory; at a drunken reunion of old school friends a man submits to fellatio rather than appear to be a bad sport; some sexy teenage girls have a boozy party and harass a shy young man; a schoolteacher gives her kids a lesson about not going along with the majority, but subsequently finds herself under peer pressure in the staffroom. It's a pawkily amusing attack on Swedish people's conformity and inclination towards reticence and respect for authority, at least when sober. But it's set in a homogeneous Nordic Sweden that appears to be unaffected demographically or behaviourally by the significant immigration of the past 40 years. Perhaps, however, this is part of the joke.