Play

I wonder how this film went over at investor pitch meetings. Imagine a posse of hostile Black kids shaking down much younger and smaller white and Asian-looking children for their phones? What if they do it with extreme psychological cruelty, relishing the extended emotional pain they inflict when a quick smash-and-grab would suffice?

What if all the adults shrug it off, won't help? What if there isn't a cop to be found in Gothenburg? Surely the "based on a true story" gambit will justify the nastiness of a way-too-long movie that also tortures its viewers.

So what if Afro-Swedish youngsters are villainized? Moral dilemmas over immigration fears and racism are hot topics - just check out the news. Bet on controversy to boost reviews and ticket sales while further polarizing a multiracial audience. Could it be that the film's oddball coda, laced with a dollop of extralegal citizen justice, was added to cinch its financing?

Ruben Ostlun delivers without redemption or enlightenment in an otherwise beautifully filmed movie notable for surprisingly solid, improvised performances by its non-pro cast. Not good enough. I would have passed.

But not from Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher, Funny Games) but from Ruben Östlund, Sweden. A toe-curling story that takes plausible after plausible step into the absurd. Sometimes too hard to watch. No happy endings here. Instead at the end the director chooses to open the fourth wall and suddenly turns fiction in a horrible truth and shows his true feathers as a clear racist.

Despite having spent much of the film frustrated at the technique used, I found myself unable to turn away and powerfully affected by the end. Shot with static cameras and long takes, sometimes with nothing happening on screen, the film makes us reluctant voyeurs in the same way that passers-by neither intervene nor quite ignore any drama in a public place. The effect is close to found footage from CCTV, with the action taking place in the background or even completely out of shot. The truth is that this could be happening anywhere in the world, right in front of us, and we would not necessarily know. The bullies have refined their tactics and each knows his role within the overall plan. The targets are slowly but surely trapped in a nightmare where bystanders are seeing everything and nothing. There is a scene where the victims ask for support from coffee shop staff but are unable to express their fears in a way that invites help. I would predict that most of us would be as reluctant as the baristas to call the police, or as unsympathetic as the tram workers who catch the children travelling without tickets.

Although filmed in Sweden and featuring older children, Play has overtones of the James Bulger case in UK, with the group developing rules almost independently of its members. Even the victims become complicit, calling back a child who attempts to escape, evoking ideas of Stockholm syndrome and horrific wartime collaborations.

The final scene adds nothing to the story apart from reversing ethnicities, but by then the impact has been felt. The story is frighteningly believable and compelling viewing.

"Sweden!" cried out President Donald Trump some time ago. 'Just look at what has happened in Sweden!' he seemed to proclaim again. But what did he mean? "Play" is the title of a devilish Ruben Östlund film; a strange amalgamation of "La Haine" and "Funny Games" which combines cinema vérité with psychological horror and social commentary. What social commentary, it seems, is left up to the viewer: audiences have appeared to whittle it down to one of two (but it could be both) things: class and ethnicity, with Swedish politicians even finding time to chip in to make thoughts known - do remarks by socialists expunge the film from charges of racism when they proclaim it is about class? Or is "Play" so clever, that they have entirely missed the fact it is a damning critic of multiculturalism.

The film opens in a shopping centre with a disagreement between two Swedish boys over an amount of money one of them has dropped and lost. "500 Krona!?" one of them exclaims - 'it's nothing', replies the other. Across the way, however, a gang of black youths who are mostly their age are eyeing them up in order to essentially mug them. Within the first scene, Östlund wants us to realise this is a society characterised by differences in income and racial disparity.

Elsewhere in the film is the lament that authority has disappeared from Swedish society: bus conductors; mall security guards and shop assistants are either powerless to giving louts a good whack or vacant altogether, save for nearer the very end where they exasperatingly appear at just the wrong moment to punish the wrong people. The film enjoys its static camera-work and neo-realistic settings, wherein dozens of people wander around the public domain, but what seems to have been deliberately kept of screen above all else is the presence of a policeman.

Where this seems to lead, or will eventually lead, is an increase in vigilantism - parents and friends of those already victim to spates of crime taking matters into their own hands and administering their own forms of justice in the absence of a state enforcing the law: not unlike various London communities forced into defending themselves form the hordes in 2011, or other groups trying to do something about paedophile gangs operating under the radar in northern England. There are two instances of this in "Play", one closing the film which doubly encompasses Sweden's apparent ignorance to what is going on amongst its young that someone is labelled a racist for trying to obtain justice.

"Play" depicts a couple of hours in the life of three boys in the city of Gothenburg and its outskirts on a grey winter's day - they are Sebastian; Alex and John, although John is of Chinese ethnicity. Whatever the problem with immigration, or immigrant crime waves specifically, John has at least seemingly integrated. When we first encounter them, they are at the offices where one of their mothers works - an upscale law firm (we can read "Adact" on the wall) whose employees dress impeccably. Östlund loiters on the entrance of the office for a while after everyone has departed, almost pointlessly, until a staffer reveals the practice to be so bourgeois that they wipe clean a glass door that was already in perfect condition.

Sebastian et al. traverse to the local shopping mall, where the earlier group of black youths are still messing around having failed to lull the twosome from the opening scene into what will transpire to be a psychologically sadistic game of bullying and robbery. The two groups first come into contact in a sports shop, where Östlund quite brilliantly keeps the coloured gang off-screen as they holler and whoop while we focus on our increasingly anxious protagonists. By the time they have been followed outside and onto the tram home, it is evident something is wrong, and from there transpires the rest of the harrowing tale.

The film's beating heart, the idea that bullies belonging to a minority string defenceless white Swedish kids along to mug them, I read is based on a spate of actual incidences of this happening over a three year period. Meanwhile, adults are too ditzy worrying about broken porcelain in cafes and blocked aisles on trains to really notice what's going on. Writers and journalists such as Jonas Hassen-Khemiri and Åsa Linderborg have made accusations, veiled or otherwise, that the film is in some way racist, while America Zavala applauds it for attacking the pitfalls of a system characterised by class.

Thematically, the film seems to reach the conclusion that Sweden is a racially and culturally diverse place - whites don dreadlocks and listen to reggae; Native Americans busk in town squares and white girls dance to Zimbabwean pop music for school performance projects. It is, however, experiencing teething problems as it makes some sort of cordial transition into multicultural permanency.

When all is said and done, one does not have to do much research to find stories, radiating in particular out of the city of Malmo, which report chaos and a complete social breakdown on account of multi-racial ghettos rioting for reasons that even the police do not know. One may also read of 'no-go' zones and youth criminality in classrooms so rife that schools have even had to shut for periods of time due to teachers feeling unsafe. Whatever the answer to any of this, Östlund has above all other things managed to make something which actually feels like a piece of cinema - something free of convention; something unpredictable and both harrowing and atmospheric without any real need for pyrotechnics. It is wholly worth seeing for these reasons and more.

Liberal upbringing, indifference in society, uncontrolled immigration from different continents, worship of fine goods - and so there are issues depicted in the film in question, mostly characteristic to Western societies. As children and teens are among most vulnerable strata, the topics mentioned above are reflected in an intensified and crooked manner. - for them, attempts for self-determination and acts of bullying are often intertwined.

Play is focused on one incident, but similar rackets occur and have occurred for decades, thus it is not astonishing or so; moreover, it is no secret that immigrant youth is more criminogenic than local one - it is nothing to do with racism, those evildoers could have easily come from the Balkans or Eastern Europe - by way of example of Sweden where youth gangs organized by race or ethnicity have become a serious issue in big cities.

Anyway, the depiction here is protracted and arid, some scenes are lacking reason, and the ending is numb. The cast is not impressive either, I would not recognize most of them in case I see them in other movies.

Thus, a mediocre movie to me, but it would be probably educational for families with children in multi-ethnic communities.