Where to find it: Rent or buy on Amazon
Length: two and a half hours
Synopsis: A luxury megayacht is the setting for an angry metaphor
Recommendation rating: 4/5
What I like about it: clever, funny, great images
What I don’t like about it: slow in parts, very gross in parts, long (though not overlong)
Review:
Ruben Östlund’s (The Square) English-language debut is inconsistent and disjointed but full of brilliant satire and further showcases his gift for visual symbolism and metaphor, while pacier than his previous European work. It opens with a modelling audition and smoothly dunks on many fashion targets before focusing on Carl, whose career has hit the skids, and girlfriend Yaya, who is doing just fine as a model/influencer and “finds it unsexy to talk about money”. They argue over dinner (providing Östlund’s signature intellectual cringe comedy) but soon reconcile and ship off for a luxury cruise on a megayacht.
Onboard, the crew is split between obsequious customer-facing staff hoping for a big tip and blue-collar boatmen hoping they don’t get noticed. Everything is luxurious and artificial and it seems to please the passengers, including Carl and Yaya – whose follower count has got them here as a freebie -, a post-Soviet oligarch, elderly English weapons manufacturers and a Swedish game developer who bears a striking resemblance to Minecraft’s notorious founder. On top of furnishing the absurd requests of their passengers, the crew are also dealing with an absentee captain, Woody Harrelson, whose alcoholism and devout Marxism bring about an encounter with the oligarch which was the funniest scene in the movie for me.
The highlight is the act two finale, when the boat is wracked by stormy seas and everyone tries to keep things ‘business as usual’ in a potent metaphor for climate change under capitalism. Unfortunately, this coincides with a highly graphic bout with seasickness and food poisoning – both brought about by poor priorities on the part of those who run the ship, further enhancing the metaphor. The final hour of the movie drags as the ship is destroyed and the survivors cope with a new social order but it ends well (an early line points out that the start and the end are the most important parts of a cruise as well as a movie, I found that cute).
Content notes (may contain spoilers): nudity, sex (coercion), vomit, defecation, corpse