This is so much better than Ostlund's more recent work! It's a film about gender roles and the ripple effects of distrust within a marriage. The writing is clever, dramatically interesting, and has all the Ostlund staples that would go on to define his style from here. There's little to no handholding for the audience, he instead prefers to let scenes play out in a long wide shot and let his actors and dialogue do the work. It feels more like you're an observer of these flawed characters with Ostlund together, rather than being told a story. It's a style that'll inevitably lead to a lot of people calling it boring, but if you know how to read human behaviour and cinema, it's anything but of course. The dark comedy is well executed, not leaning as much on satire as his work after this. I kinda wish he sometimes pushed the story to more interesting places, though. For example, the film flirts with this idea that the husband might cheat on his wife, but that doesn't go anywhere ultimately and it's just reduced to this brief comedic scene. Still, I like what he's going for thematically and the film wraps up in a way that respects the subtlety of the film that came before it. Technically the film's pretty excellent. The cinematography is great, I think it looks much better than _The Square_ and _Triangle of Sadness_ (although its location does a lot of the work). However, the minimal editing style doesn't always lead to the most concise version of scenes, and the film feels slightly overlong as a result. There's also this brief scene where Ostlund takes the David Fincher _Social Network_ route of mixing sound, meaning music is favoured instead of hearing the dialogue. It's kind of a shame because the dialogue is so much more interesting than the tacky EDM that's playing in the foreground.

7.5/10