Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.
Roy Andersson's final chapter in his Living Trilogy is a singular cinematic vision — a series of meticulously composed, long-take tableaux vivants that are utterly unlike anything else in world cinema. The cinematography is genuinely exceptional: every static frame is a painting, with desaturated pallor, precise depth staging, and an uncanny stillness that creates dread and absurdist comedy simultaneously. Novelty is very high because Andersson's voice is completely unmistakable — the deadpan repetition, the philosophical weight embedded in mundane grotesquerie, the two hapless novelty salesmen as hollow witnesses to human cruelty across centuries. Acting is stylized and intentional rather than naturalistic, earning a solid above-average in its own terms. The plot is deliberately episodic and anti-narrative, which is part of the design but limits dramatic momentum. The ending, while hauntingly poetic with its final image of the pigeon, doesn't deliver a fully satisfying culmination compared to the film's ambitious scope.