Carousel

It was not really much of a debate whether or not to sit down and watch the 2023 Swedish horror movie "Karusell" (aka "Carousel", though the movie was oddly titled "Halloween Park" as the title was on the screen), when I happened to stumble upon it by random luck here in 2024. Sure, I had never even heard about it prior to watching it, but that was no deterrence from sitting down to watch it.

And this was actually the first Swedish horror movie I have ever seen. Sure, I have watched Swedish movies and TV before, but never a horror movie.

Writers Mårten Gisbym Filip Hammarström and Henry Stenberg starts the movie out quite nicely in an upbeat pace, which definitely was something I liked. The storyline was actually fairly okay, and it made for a fair enough viewing experience. There was something about a horror movie set to play out in an amusement park, which is supposed to be a place of fun and laughter.

The narrative, however, took a turn for a more slow pace, after a rather intense beginning of the movie. A mere 30 minutes into the movie, I actually thought that I had sat through maybe 45 or 60 minutes. So arm yourself with some patience, should you opt to sit down and watch "Karusell".

Given my extremely limited exposure to the Swedish cinema, then I was not familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list. The acting performances by the cast members were good though. It was, however, insanely difficult to understand the dialect spoken by actress Wilma Lidén.

Ultimately, "Karusell" had potential, but the writers opted to play it safe and ran with some generic horror tropes, and that sort of made it into a rather generic, although watchable, young adults running from a masked slasher type horror movie, and those were a dime a dozen back in the glory days of horror cinema.

My rating of director Simon Sandquist's 2023 horror movie "Karusell" lands on a five out of ten stars.