avalanche

Force Majeure is full of emotional crises

By Jenny Alvarez

Photos Agency

 Written and directed by Östlund (Play, Involuntary), Force Majeure is dramatic, intriguing, challenging and disturbing. Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke), and his willowy wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) and their two blond, pre-teen children – travels to the picturesque French Alps to enjoy a few days of skiing. But during lunch at a mountainside restaurant, an avalanche turns everything upside down. With panicked diners fleeing in all directions, Ebba calls out for her husband as she tries to protect their children. Tomas, however, makes a decision that will shake the family’s world to its core. Although the anticipated disaster fails to occur, his marriage now hangs in the balance as he struggles to reclaim his role as family patriarch.

 Despite of the snowballing tension and friction between the characters, this film is precisely observed psychodrama in which masculinity is satirized and full of hidden prejudices. Ebba is dealing with a near-death experience and feeling abandoned so here all the members of the family are affected mainly when the husband who reflects certain cowardice because he grabbed his phone and gloves and runs away from the oncoming torrent of avalanche, effectively abandoning his family in the process. Definitely is a film full of intense moments of pain and regret. Here is when the family must now deal with the fact that Tomas chose his own well-being over that of his family.