Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
Two teenage girls in small-town Sweden. Elin is beautiful, popular, and bored with life. Agnes is friendless, sad, and secretly in love with Elin.
Lukas Moodysson's debut is a deeply felt, naturalistic portrait of teenage longing in a Swedish small town. The performances — especially Alexandra Dahlström and Rebecca Liljeberg — are startlingly authentic, capturing adolescent awkwardness and yearning with rare honesty. The film's novelty lies in how it strips away the melodrama typically attached to coming-out stories and replaces it with mundane, painfully real social dynamics; its voice is wholly its own. The ending, with its defiant public declaration, earns genuine emotional catharsis without feeling contrived. Cinematography is functional and deliberately unglamorous, serving the story well without distinction. The plot itself is slender and episodic — deliberately so — but that restraint occasionally leaves the middle act feeling thin.