A 30-something man wakes up in agony with blood in his hands and clothes, only to get up and carry on ahead through his day at break-neck speed, ignoring all signs of disaster. A fever-pitch intensity follows that escalates into claustrophobic desperation within a first-person-perspective: what the hell has occurred?! OK, imagine the worst possible personal tragedy occurring the night before to a character like that... well, I give you 2 guesses! In all fairness to filmmaker Jesper Ganslandt, but the scenario of what has happened in this Swedish thriller-drama is to me VERY obvious after 15 minutes.

What is NOT obvious, though, are the surfacing, immediate reactions and actions of a person's mind after such a tragedy. And that turns this into a highly realistic, quite spellbinding state of shock for 80 minutes. The case-solving itself is not relevant, and for that reason, the greatest asset is a terrific and highly credible performance by Olle Sarri in the lead. He dissolves bit by bit in front of us through his 24-hour ordeal, like a modern-day Raskolnikov, but without the philosophical aftermath. So, we have indeed a thriller - but also a psychological drama.

And there is my main quibble: with a story (and an ending) like this, writer-director Ganslandt also leaves out all surrounding details like backgrounds, bonds, motives, etc. It cries for a social commentary context and an epilogue. I know its enclosed format certainly makes material for tons of discussions, but it leaves me a bit wanting.

All in all, quite impressive and a needful change of pace for the more poetic "Farväl Falkenberg"-filmmaker!

6/10 from Ozjeppe.

A man wakes up in a bathroom. He seems disoriented and is covered in blood. He tries to pull himself together the best he can; he washes off the blood, he leaves the house, and carries on with his day. He goes to work, he goes shopping, he goes to work and he visits his mother. Meanwhile, he is ostensibly confused, afraid, in pain and full of anxiety.

Jesper Ganslandt's puzzling drama about an unknown man's odyssey is an uncompromisingly dark character study and one of the most unsettling Swedish films of the decade, at least. The intrusive and somewhat naturalistic direction, with a shaky, hand-held camera following the man from only a few feet's distance, creates a very unsettling feeling; it places the viewer right next to a person who could break down at any minute. This feeling is enhanced by the performance of the brilliantly casted Olle Sarri. Apart from being an excellent performance in itself, Sarri is mostly known for his role in a Swedish sitcom which creates a disturbing contrast to the character he plays here.

If I said that the viewer gets very close to the main character physically, we are certainly not invited into his mind. First of all, we are given very little information throughout the film about what has actually happened to the man. There is very little dialogue in the film, and much of it consists of hearing the main character talk on the phone. We only get to hear his side of the conversation, and he mostly says phrases like "yes" and "I will", which hardly leaves the audience with many clues. The few conversations that take place in person are either completely insignificant, or works on a symbolical level, such as the brilliant scene where a boy tells him about a dream he had, or when his mother is describing a painting she made – the former captures the recurring theme about alienation, whereas the latter suggests, and serves as a metaphor for, the man's possible assault on his son.

When the film is over, we hardly know more than we did from the start; at best, the things that we guessed from the start seem to have been true, if still far from obvious. This might leave some viewers frustrated or feeling robbed, but in a film that has constantly been designed to allow the audience to fill in the blanks, and as a closure to a brief and enigmatic glimpse of an unstable man's life, it fits perfectly.

There's always a recurring theme we witness in Haneke's films; life is brutal...

...and time to time, too painful to bear.

No need to be a careful eye; director Jesper Ganslandt is a follower of Haneke cinematography, which is based on solid psychoanalysis of both borderline human nature and structure of society with a complicated resolution of history. This what Ganslandt does in this film.

Krister is a man we see and pass by on the street in our everyday lives and also can be easily mixed with who we really are. An ordinary family man with a decent job and has what we call it a normal life. But, mostly, it's not what it seems above the surface. At the beginning of the movie, he wakes up in the middle of his own toilet with blood all over his clothes and place. Then we see him take off, do his everyday routine and go back home at the end of the day. And this is when we get it; the reason behind the blood on his clothes is a murder he has committed a night before. The murder of his wife and a plus. An attempted murder on his own kid.

From this part of the film we see Krister dealing with his own personality, which comes down to characteristic resolution that consists on his own past and how he perceived the term family, how he's been treated by his own parents, especially the mother. The mother is always the key, as in our lives as well, she forms a perfect picture of Oedipus. As a man who can only communicate with people through his headphone and not in person, Krister isn't a successful example of out-of-closet personality, and having a hard time to integrate it with his life as he's known it thus far, and eventually, end up in destroying his own family which is pointing out destroying his own past, and especially, again, the mother.

I think what makes this film stunning is that the amount of moments we see ourselves in Krister. Krister is who we are and who we are completes the character Krister wee witness in this movie. He can be any of us, if we consist on the theory of that most of us are homosexuals subliminally. This is a story of not being. Of not being yourself, not taking your sexual identity in your hands as you like...

...Of not being who you really are.