Play

Director: Ruben Östlund
Starring: Anas Abdirahman, Sebastian Blyckert, Yannick Diakité
Rating:

‘What does being an immigrant have to do with anything?’ demands a flustered parent towards the end of Play. That’s the elephant in the room during Ruben Östlund’s film, a dispassionate drama of human unpleasantness in the vein of Michael Haneke. On one level, it’s about bullying: the central story involves a trio of middle-class boys in Gothenburg who are accosted, toyed with and eventually robbed by a group of older kids. The fact that the perpetrators are black ultimately makes little difference to their victims, but is likely to provoke no end of squirming in the sophisticated, politically correct audiences for whom the film is clearly intended. When a pair of fathers try to confront one of the group later on, the impotence of their gesture is compounded when they’re interrupted by a pregnant woman who chastises them for picking on a child – and one from an immigrant family, at that. Touché. Östlund shoots much of the action in long, tightly framed shots where some of the actors are out of view, lending them the deadening immediacy of watching a crime unfold on CCTV footage. Though the tension sags at points, for the most part this is as compelling as it is utterly grim to watch, and the young cast excel themselves.

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