“If he hadn’t already laid claim to the title of king of the cringe-inducing confrontation and nabob of the nervous laugh with the withering Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund truly anoints himself with The Square, an excoriating razor-burn of a movie that deploys drollery like an instrument of torture,” begins Jessica Kiang at the Playlist. “Broadening out his canvas from the family dynamics of his previous avalanche movie before slashing it to similarly precise shreds, The Square is made up of dozens of scenes of such perfect, short-story polish and bite that it almost feels like a vignette anthology rather than a feature. And yet, at least until an unfortunate slackening of pace and a slight dulling of edge toward the end of a long two hours and twenty minutes, the scathing sensibility remains a constant, dark delight.”
Variety’s Owen Gleiberman suggests that “Östlund creates suspense the old-fashioned way, setting up scenes that make the audience go: What in God’s name is going to happen next? But he also creates suspense in a new-fangled way, turning the space between people into an alarming existential battleground. He’s like Hitchcock infused with the spirit of mid-period Bergman.”
“The Square turns a contemporary art museum into a city-state of bizarre, dysfunctional and Ballardian strangeness,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “It is a place where one important person’s guilt infects an entire society with a creeping nervous breakdown, at once intensified and yet camouflaged by a notional belief in aesthetic nonconformism and provocative performance art. This movie really brings some gobsmackingly weird and outrageous spectacle, with moments of pure show-stopping freakiness. Eventually it loses a bit of focus and misses some narrative targets which have been sacrificed to those admittedly extraordinary set pieces. It doesn’t have the pure weapon-like clarity of Östlund’s previous film Force Majeure. But it sets out to make your jaw drop. And it succeeds.”
“Christian (Claes Bang, a dead-ringer for a 40-something Gregory Peck), is chief curator for the ultra-hip, ultra-chic X-Royal Museum,” explains Barbara Scharres at RogerEbert.com. “He’s handsome, pretentious, and arrogant in the privilege and power that make him the peer of the wealthy. . . . In the episodic construction of The Square, and its deadpan approach to comedy, Östlund’s work begins to resemble that of another Swedish film satirist, Roy Andersson (A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence). Östlund is not quite that good yet, but he’s getting there.”
“So far-out is some of the stuff that goes on at the X-Royal Museum that it momentarily looks as though the film will emerge as a full-fledged comedy, but it’s the mix of mordant humor and sulfurous weirdness that defines its true nature,” writes the Hollywood Reporter’s Todd McCarthy. “Christian’s private life remains little explored for a long while, until he finally engages in a one-night stand with an American journalist (Elisabeth Moss), earlier seen conducting an inept interview with him, who later attempts to engage in a far more uncomfortable sort of probing; she also seems to have a chimpanzee as a flat-mate.”
“The Square is at its best doing just two of the many things it essays,” argues Lee Marshall in Screen. “The first is to use a municipal contemporary art museum—conceived by Östlund and architect Gert Wingårdh as a Modernist space inserted into the fabric of Stockholm’s Royal Palace—to probe in comic but also serious ways how we engage with culture, power, and each other. The second is to chart the undoing of a cocky, polished aesthete turned businessman and politician, whose downward trajectory begins when he tries to let his alpha male side out of its cage. But in all its flawed brilliance, The Square remains an original, visceral, uncomfortable and essential viewing experience.”
Rory O’Connor at the Film Stage: “The Old Testament rule of law vibe in Östlund’s films—thematically similar in some ways to the Coens’ Fargo—is designed to elicit that exquisitely excruciating pain of watching a character be repeatedly given a chance to get out of the awful situation they have gotten themselves into only to let it pass by, usually for no reason other than to save face or maintain an already lost status quo.”
“It is a film both frustrating and jocular, as well as stimulating and astute as it explores our attitudes of appropriateness and how pushing boundaries can have terrifyingly restrictive effects on the collective consensus of good taste and what’s considered the politically correct,” writes Nicholas Bell at Ioncinema.
“It's so slick, intelligent, subversive, and yet so damn entertaining,” adds Alex Billington at First Showing. But at CineVue, John Bleasdale finds that “it's in the last half that Östlund's thumb on the scales begins to leave a print. . . . The pummeling of liberal guilt and hypocrisy also feels badly timed in the age that coined ‘libtard’ and Christian himself seems to behave inconsistently almost as if he is doing so at the behest of some point the director wants to make, rather than from motivations of character.”
“When we are in public spaces and don’t know who’s in charge, we have a problem with taking responsibility,” Östlund tells Variety’s Alissa Simon. “For me, it was a way to point out how we are herd animals, how we are paralyzed when something happens that we are scared of and the feeling is, ‘don’t take me, don’t take me, take someone else!’”
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