REVIEW: DVD Release: Involuntary

Film: Involuntary
Release date: 28th February 2011
Certificate: 15
Running time: 98 mins
Director: Ruben Östlund
Starring: Villmar Björkman, Linnea Cart-Lamy, Leif Edlund, Sara Eriksson, Lola Ewerlund
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Studio: Trinity
Format: DVD
Country: Sweden

Sweden's official submission for Best Foreign Language Film at the 2010 Academy Awards, and an award winner at various international film festivals, Involuntary tells five parallel stories that take place in and around the suburbs of Gothenburg. Intercutting between the five different stories, director Ruben Ostlund takes an unflinching, unsentimental look at how group dynamics impact on human behaviour.

Involuntary begins as it ends, with the view from the front of a vehicle driving through city streets at night. Only at the end of the film do we realise that the view is from an ambulance transporting a man to hospital. The man is Villmar, a grandfather who earlier in the evening refused professional medical attention after he was injured by a firework that exploded in his face at a birthday party.

Very different to the stoic Villmar are Linnea and Sara, two giggly teenage girls who take pictures of themselves posing together as models and get drunk with their friends, leading to Linnea passing out and being abandoned by the side of a road. Alcohol is also an important ingredient in the story of a group of thirty-something men holidaying in the country, one of whom is sexually assaulted in a prank gone too far.

In contrast, the mood is as sober as it is sombre in the story of a teacher who feels she is being ostracised by her peers after she accuses an older male colleague of abusing a pupil, and in the tale of a middle-aged actress on a coach trip who lets a young boy take the blame after she accidentally breaks a curtain rod in the on-board toilet…


The individual stories may, on the surface, sound as though they’re lacking in dramatic tension, but the way Ostlund weaves them together gives Involuntary an intriguing, surprisingly absorbing quality. Not a lot happens, but it happens in such a way that issues of group identity and behaviour are slyly, fascinatingly dissected.

Comparisons have been made to Michael Haneke, but while Ostlund shares something of Haneke’s detached, unsentimental approach, his narratives are, for better or worse, clearer cut and more obviously resolved. The Swede has also injected Involuntary with a streak of deadpan humour that adds a touch of warmth where Haneke would probably opt for an icier, more solemn feel.

The humour in Involuntary is hardly laugh-out-loud funny, but it does raise the odd knowing smile, and serves the film’s overall theme well. The discomfort of the teacher who feels that that her colleagues are marginalising her is contrasted against her earlier attempts to teach a group of pre-schoolers that submitting to peer pressure is wrong, and on the coach trip the solitary actress has to cope with a talkative fan who pesters her incessantly.

There is also a certain wry humour in the way that Ostlund deliberately sets out to tell five separate stories that do not converge or intersect at any point. If Involuntary was a Hollywood film, the five separate stories would most likely overlap at some point, but the only link in Ostlund’s film is the way the characters in each of the five stories are affected by the groups they are a part of.

Some viewers will enjoy this approach, while others may just find it alienating. Similarly, Ostlund’s use of long takes and unusual camera angles and positions will not be to everybody’s taste. Individual scenes were apparently painstakingly rehearsed and then shot uninterrupted, with Ostlund filming as many as twenty takes of each scene before achieving what he was looking for. Maria Lundqvist is the only well known actor in the film, but the entire cast deliver exceptional, highly naturalistic performances.

The results often feel more like a documentary than a work of fiction, but Ostlund counters this by placing his camera in unusual positions: at one point at floor level so that we see only the lower limbs and feet of the characters, and in another scene facing a car door so that we watch the reflections of men talking. Ostlund also allows the camera to film when there is very little movement, and, at times, his visual approach seems closer to contemporary art photography than filmmaking.

The overall effect is a highly distinctive film that some viewers will find poignant and quietly entrancing for the same reasons that others will find it obtuse and uneventful. Like a William Eggleston photograph, Involuntary has a low-key, quotidian charm that is refreshingly lacking in melodrama and hyperbole.


Involuntary offers an absorbing and insightful look at how different individuals abandon free will in the face of peer pressure, and is filmed in such a way as to encourage viewers to use their own free will and imagination to interpret events that unfold. JG