Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.
Ruben Östlund's Palme d'Or-winning satire is visually audacious and conceptually singular, skewering bourgeois liberal hypocrisy and the art world's self-congratulatory culture with piercing wit. The cinematography deploys long, uncomfortable takes and precisely framed static shots to devastating satirical effect — the dinner performance scene is one of the decade's most audacious set pieces. The ensemble, led by Claes Bang, is uniformly excellent. Novelty is high because the film's tone, structure, and satirical voice are genuinely one-of-a-kind. The plot is deliberately episodic and sometimes meandering, which serves the thematic purpose but can frustrate as conventional narrative. The ending, while thematically coherent, dissipates somewhat rather than delivering a fully earned payoff.