Ägget är löst! En hårdkokt saga

I got a really strange but nice feeling when I saw this one. It almost feels like that your watching a sci-fi movie of some kind. I really love the part when Gösta Ekman falls into a lake and lie there for months, and after a while he is transformed into a kind of water creature. 9 / 10

Hasse got serious without his sidekick. Even though this movie has a lot of humour, Hasse is waxing serious in it, and this is what makes it memorable. And the acting - from the cruel Max to the genial Gösta, these are performances which will etch themselves in your mind. Hasse wants to bring us back to nature. He wants us to remember what we've forgot. He was a great comedian with Tage, and a great author too, and here he shows what he can do with film.

This film is overall so-so, it has its ups and downs, including one peek which is to be mentioned as one of the best scenes in Swedish motion picture history, where the cold-hearted father (Von Sydow) throws his son (Gösta Ekman) into a secluded lake, where he gets caught in the soil. We then get to follow the process of how he becomes a part of the lake and the nature. The fact that everything that happens to him, in theory could happen in real life, fortifies the experience enormously. The scene is performed with such elegance and such captivating manners, leaving the audience breathless.

Director Hans Alfredson, one of Sweden's all-time greats, most commonly known under his nickname Hasse as part of the Hasse & Tage duo, was a humorist, a performer, an actor, a writer and a director.

During most of Hans Alfredson's career, Sweden was a country increasingly influenced by leftist ideas, sprinkled with a little bit of early environmentalism. As most of his colleagues of the era, Mr. Alfredson strove to lead the way.

Ägget är löst! Is a humorous take on a dystopian, capitalist future. A near future, not a distant one. As such, it contains elements of satire and the plainly absurd, topped off by a (un)healthy dose of Oedipus complex for the well-read crowd.

The film boasts an all-star cast, including third generation national icon Gösta Ekman as the protagonist, and Birgitta Andersson and Max von Sydow as his parents.

Although time hasn't done this movie any favors, I would still recommend it to anyone with a genuine interest in Swedish cinema.