UFO Sweden

 Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug) is a troubled young woman whose UFO-obsessed dad disappeared while she was very young. And because this is a very specific type of movie, running through a series of foster homes means that she of course grows up to be a John Connor-style teen delinquent who's a wiz with computers: she's even introduced hacking a keypad with a modified gameboy.

 When her father's car somehow reappears, crashing into some farmer's barn in the middle of the night, she contacts UFO Sweden - a bunch of middle-aged nerds/UFO enthusiasts - to try and make sense of what's happening. And as it turns out, the government is... well, not in on it, exactly - it's never quite clear what anyone is doing in this movie - but there's a lady in meteorological services who seems to be tracking gravity disturbances, data that Denise recovers and uses to zero in on just what happened to her father all those years ago.

 With the conspiracy angle a complete mess, the movie is left needing some antagonists. This void is filled by a well-meaning police officer (Sara Shirpey) who gets it into her head that UFO Sweden is some sort of cult, and a turncoat within UFO Sweden who just doesn't seem to like Denise much and so decides to become evil as a result. Hey, I didn't say that there'd be good antagonists.

 The script - by director Victor Danell and Jimmy Nivrén Olsson - is piss-poor, stringing some dire science fiction conceits along a series of terrible, terrible decisions, arbitrary developments and inscrutable motivations. Events don't really make much sense as presented, and its characters don't come out looking great, either; Just how UFO Sweden ends up rallying behind Denise, for example, is a mystery, given how she tends to behave like a little shit and only acts nice when she needs something out of them. But, you know, she's the protagonist, so not only does that shit fly, I think it's supposed to be relatable?

 It reeks of script improvisation or extreme tinkering right up to the point where the cameras started rolling. 

 However, while the filmmaking is not truly great, it's very muscular and features some pretty excellent chases, car crashes, a couple of interesting special effect sequences and a few instances of great comedic timing. The acting is also good, with a well-developed central relationship between Denise and Lennart (Jesper Barkselius), leader of UFO Sweden and an old friend of her dad's. Most importantly, it sticks the landing with a strong emotional scene that capitalizes on all the good work Torhaug and Barkselius put in throughout the movie.

 And while the music (by Oskar Sollenberg and Gustaf Spetz) consists of the expected sci-fi synths, they're lovely sci-fi synths.

 Whether you'll like it or not will depend on your tolerance for the iffy script, and if you can be bought over by the film's surfaces; Despite a long runtime for what it is, it doesn't really drag too much, and there's always enough going on even if it doesn't make sense all that often. It's not actually a good movie - within this space, I'd direct you towards Jeff Nichol's Midnight Special for that - but... I don't know; While I rolled my eyes a lot during its runtime, a good ending can retroactively enhance any movie. It's all right.

The Conference (Konferensen)

 The Conference is a new slasher movie from Sweden with a side of (very slight) satire. It's a fun one.

 A bunch of government functionaries get together at a holiday resort for a team-building exercise to celebrate the completion of their latest project: final approval for a shopping center that will (in theory) bring much needed tourism and business to their neck of the woods.
 Not all of them are sold on the achievement, mind; a new hire (Bahar Pars) questions the legality of the proceeds, another (Cecilia Nilsson) the environmental impact of the enterprise, and Lina (Katia Winter, the closest the movie comes to a point-of-view character) comes back from stress-related sick leave to find that the documents on file aren't the ones she remembers signing.
 Opposite them, a trio of corporate-minded morons: bosswoman Ingela (Maria Sid), idiotically trying to put a positive spin to everything, a vapid yes-man (Christoffer Nordenrot) and a sociopath corporate climber (Adam Lundgren) who portrays his character with such bug-eyed intensity he sort of looks like a human ventriloquist dummy.

 The satire angle is kind of fun, but so over the top it lacks any sort of bite. Good thing, then, that it's not the film's main attraction; That'd be a shady figure circling around the resort, killing people quietly at first, and then laying siege to the terrified survivors. Along the way he puts on the oversized mask of the future shopping center's mascot, for full ironic marks.

 It's nothing you haven't seen before (even the work retreat setting/workplace satire is recycled), but it's done well and with gusto. It's reasonably tense, the kills are good, and there's a good mix of characters so that you can enjoy some of the murders and wince at others.

 Things get pretty gory - not nearly as much as in other recent examples of the genre, but there are some fairly gruesome, graphic deaths. Editor Robert Krantz has some fun cutting between the carnage and the corpos having "fun" (someone gets brained with a pan, cut to someone banging a gong), and the cinematography (by Simon Rudholm) is crisp, wintry, and always clear.
 Director Patrik Eklund obviously knows his slashers and does well by them, managing to get some pretty cool scenes (a slow-motion decapitation comes to mind). As for his script (Co-written with Thomas Moldestad), its... well, it's all right. The whodunnit aspect is so perfunctory it might well not exist - even as it's presented as some sort of puzzle - and most of the other plot developments are pretty predictable. But those aren't fatal flaws for this sort of movie; on the plus side, it seeds some tools early on that will later be used in ways that would upset health and safety officers, and takes enough liberties with slasher conventions to earn itself at least some goodwill.

Knocking (Knackningar)

 Molly (Cecilia Milocco) is having a rough time of it. After some time institutionalized for an unspecified reason (which one assumes has something to do with the loss of her partner in a mysterious beachside incident) she's let free to go to a small apartment to continue her life.

 The problem is that she doesn't have much of a life to go back to, which, well, doesn't do wonders for her mental state. Neither does a once-in-a-decade heatwave.
 So when she starts hearing knocking sounds (and later cries) coming from one of the apartments on the floor above her and convinces herself that a woman is being tortured, well... you can imagine how well her efforts at investigating that go.

 Knocking is a bleak, slow-burn Swedish psychological thriller that's filmed like a horror movie, a claustrophobic chamber piece that works more as a character study than as any sort of genre exercise because there's just not much to the story besides its deeply empathetic presentation of Molly's character. Everything is filtered through her point of view as she sinks into depression, seems to suffer from delusions, and is treated with varying degrees of wary hostility by others.

 The technical aspects are impeccable: Frida Kempff's direction is assured, with an eye for interesting shots, and the cinematography (by Hannes Krantz) is beautiful. Above all, the film revolves around an incredibly vulnerable performance from Cecilia Milocco, who manages to instill her character with a huge amount of humanity despite the limited range of emotions displayed during the movie. It's got to have been a thankless task, and she does an incredible job.

 There are some stunning images spread throughout the film, but while watching the character is riveting, following the story around her isn't; It's a standard thriller, with no real surprises and a shrug of a 'twist' at the end. It doesn't really do anything wrong, and I liked how it tends to leave things unexplained, but... well, there's just not a lot going on here.
 It's the sort of film I feel I should have liked more than I did, but there's just too little for me to latch onto.

Aniara

Now we have fathomed what our space-ship is

--a tiny bubble in a glass of God.

 Aniara is a Swedish science fiction film based on a 1956 epic poem by Harry Martinson. I'd never heard of it, but it's a pretty big deal: It won a Nobel prize, and SF luminaries such as Theodore Sturgeon, Poul Anderson and Vernor Vinge were apparently fans.

 In any case, I'm glad they adapted it into a film. It's a bleakly existentialist (is there any other type of existentialist?) nightmare that enjoys nothing more than stabbing you in the emotional nuts repeatedly. All the Swedes I know have a very healthy sense of black humour, and I imagine they find this movie delightful.

 So, what is it about?

 Aniara is a Swedish- oh, wait, I've already said that. Ahem. Aniara is a spaceship; A floating city that ferries humans between a dying earth and colonies in Mars. It's more than a little bit like a giant cruise liner; Its passengers can expect amenities, shopping malls, a large auditorium, pools and a MIMA room, among other things.  (MIMA is a sort of holodeck analogue room where passengers can 'hook up' and revisit places from their memories as vivid illusions. Most people ignore it at first, I imagine like VR parlours in our time, but it becomes important later).

 The mission to mars soon goes wrong when the ship is thrown off-course after an encounter with some space debris; Aniara, and all the souls aboard, are sent hurtling out of the solar system and into the void.... with no hope of going back or of being rescued.
 People turn to MIMA at first, and later to other, more bizarre ways to pass the time. This, by the way, includes pretty graphic and not very fun-looking cultish orgies.

 The film follows the ship's MIMA operator (Emelie Garbers). Thanks to her role (and she's only ever known by her job title, Mimaroben) she has a front row to a few important events aboard the ship. Later she falls in love, has a child, and in general tries to lead a good life and present a brave face against heartbreak and an ultimately futile existence. Hmmm.

 While she may be the point of view character, the real heart of the movie for me is the Astronomer (Anneli Martini, and yes, her character never gets a proper name either). She is introduced earnestly saying she doesn't care that everyone on earth is dying: "I've never been very impressed by people," she declares. The quote at the start of this post is hers as well, trying to articulate just how insignificant the Aniara is to the universe.

 The Astronomer is the one that constantly finds fault with the lies other people try to find comfort in, the one who is brutally realistic about their fate. No prizes awarded for guessing where that will get her, and no prizes awarded for guessing whether she's right or not.

 While the budget is obviously not huge, it's very well utilized by the directing team of Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja (who also adapted Martinson's poem for the screen). The designs are good (loved the space elevator with advertisements along the bottom!), the cinematography is clean and almost stately, and the actors are uniformly excellent. 

Speaking as a hard sci-fi pedant, the science part of the genre equation itself is a little suspect: The technologies involved are extremely handwavy, entropy doesn't seem to be as active as you'd expect given some of the time periods involved, and the ship does go through a very Star Trek weird shiny pink cloud at one point... But none of this matters because the sci-fi ethos is very much present in the thrust of the story. This is ruthless, unflinching speculation, without the concessions you might expect from something meant as entertainment.

 All this might make Aniara sound like a chore to watch, but I didn't find it so at all. It's a bit ponderous but there are enough events and developments to keep the forward momentum going. And maybe a little pitch-black humour to leaven things up a little... if you squint. Right up until the bold gallows humour of the final chapter's title card.

 Turns out the film isn't very impressed by people, either.