This is one of the best portrayals I´ve seen on film, of mental illness in general and psychosis specifically! It walks a line between two ways of mental illness-portrayal, keeping an almost perfectly balanced mixture of both.
On the one hand, we have the very realistic "from-the-outside" perspective, where we get to see the mother lose grip of reality, becoming ugly, aggressive and deeply delusional. The actress Josefin Neldén does this insanely well(yup, that pun came naturally, and I had to let it stay!). If she hadn´t managed to get across such a realistic image of a human in psychosis, this film would have fallen flat. But she does, and damm, to be able to project that state in such a manner can not be easy acting. But of course, the writing plays a part as well. She has insightful material to work with.
So, while the first ("outside") perspective rests almost entirely on Josefin Neldén´s deliverance, the second is more about the script and a sort of ambience of the movie. This is harder to pinpoint in a few words, but the film conveys somewhat of an "inside" view of psychosis. How it is experienced from the inside. This could have so easily gone wrong (it often does) and become hyperbole or pure artsy surrealism (or simply too one-dimensional and coherent so that it will speak to sane minds), but it hits just right at the target for the most part. It´s difficult to explain how, without having to become very lengthy, but I feel this movie have managed to portray a psychosis -which is not subject to normal ways of rationale and coherence- in a way that is coherent and rational from the perspective of someone who have themselves had first hand experience of the spectrum of that phenomenon.
This second perspective is navigated very well by Josefine Stofkoper playing the daughter.
To put it more concretely, the daughter´s world/mind is also fragmented (from being just a kid, and from having grown up in symbiosis with someone who regularly enters into psychosis) and her stay in stockholm is shattered by her mothers sudden relapse. This state of hers is portrayed beautyfully. Her mother´s world view melts into the daughter´s, and there is a definitive innuendo lurking in the movie that the daughter might herself become ill with time. But, she is also a kid, experiencing a sudden independence in the big city. Playing around, making a friend, looking for her father...or did she? WE don´t always knows what happens in the tangible world of physics, and what stems from her imagination. And a second layer of un-knowing is, that we don´t know how much is her own possible impending illness, and how much is quite normal youthful imagination.
I feel movies rarely are able to handle this much ambiguity (being very realistic, and dreamlike at the same time) without becoming disjointed and possibly uninteresting, but this one does the job.
