Force Majeure

I have to say that at the end of the movie, I ended is a mild state of shock that lasted at least 20 minutes before I could start to assimilate the content of the movie. Visually the movie is well executed, the sceneries are not complex but the shots fit perfectly the situations that happen along the movie.

About the movie as a whole, I could say that you could easily write a book about it, is so full of different things like human emotions, psychological collapses, marriage problems, bizarre situations, funny scenes that could produce so many different reactions on people, the nature of the female and male towards protecting others... I could go on and on and on. I think that at the end of the movie the viewers will have a lot to talk about.

If you are a passionate and curious person and you take the decision to see this movie, be patient and enjoy it from the beginning to the end without interruptions.

I consider myself fortunate not to have known much about the movie. Actually, I was expecting a french disaster-flick in the vein of "127 Hours", a post-avalanche survival tale, because of the promotional poster.

Boy, I was wrong. Being misguided often gets me irritated, but "Force Majeure" was shockingly impressive.

The narrative follows a Swedish couple on a ski-holiday with their children, and the aftermath of them facing a somewhat life- threatening situation. The disaster here is not a force of nature, but a force of human emotions.

With no intention of spoiling a movie you should know as little as possible about, this is a hard hitting emotional drama about human frailty, marriage, inner torment and moral dilemmas when it comes to love, and the authenticity of love.

Very much recommended to lovers of layered, intelligent drama. And I repeat, this is not a natural disaster movie.

Force Majeure attempts to find deep meaning in a husband's failed response to a sudden crisis. A family's routine ski trip is thrown into turmoil when he responds poorly to an apparent avalanche. The movie is largely a character study of the aftermath. The problem is that it is one of those movies with virtually no sympathetic characters. As such it's a bit of a difficult watch. It is hard to join the movie in its search for meaning, when the main characters are so alienating and off-putting. Even the kids in the family aren't particularly sympathetic. Further, the movie attempts to wring way too much melodrama out of a relatively minor incident. For me it was more tiresome than enlightening. Finally, I thought some of the plot devices were amateurish; too many plot twists depended on cell phones not working. While I appreciated the film's ambition, it did not work for me.

This was billed as "wickedly funny" and a "dark comedy" but I never laughed once. It's not a terrible movie, but it is decidedly not funny. It's borderline depressing much of the time to be honest.

I knew nothing about Ruben Östlund's "Turist" ("Force Majeure" in English) when I started watching it, so that made it more intense. I interpreted the movie as a look at instances when people suppress unpleasant things, only to see dangerous situations force them to face reality. The approaching avalanche foretells the repressed issues that the family will have to address, and the question of how to flee a dangerous place functions as a good plot device.

We often stereotype Scandinavian movies as slow, and this is no exception. But mind you, the slow pace allows the story and the characters to thoroughly develop, and the music really sets the stage. The alpine setting may look pristine and idealistic, but what transpires over the course of the movie is nothing of the sort.

I recommend it.