Sweden
Joseph Walsh
Who would have thought that Ari Aster could top the satanic delights of Hereditary? Yet with Midsommar, a psychedelic twist on folk horror, he has. Aster abandons the supernatural to show that it’s not things that go bump in the night that scare us, it’s other people.Think of your worst romantic relationship, the one that churned you up inside and left you a sobbing mess for months. This is the territory that Aster mines in his latest work. Florence Pugh plays Dani, a post-grad student whose life is split between worrying about her suicidal, bipolar sister, and her relationship with Christian Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The botched 1973 hostage incident which inspired the term Stockholm syndrome comes to flatly comic life here, the strange psychological phenomenon of captives falling for their captors over time being reduced to an absurd caper. Bringing out the insipid worst in Ethan Hawke as machine-gun wielding softie Lars, it remains watchable thanks to Noomi Rapace’s enigmatic, quivering power as the hostage he bonds with.Lars takes over a Stockholm bank one sunny morning, in a city here parodically pastel-coloured and post-hippie, with the radio dial agreeably set to Dylan in his country-rock phase (the Read more ...
joe.muggs
Sadness abounds in Avicii's posthumous third album. In context, even the plaintive single syllable of the title is full of pathos. It reminds of the real person, the Swede Tim Bergling who as a teenager discovered he had an unerring ability to hit the commercial sweet spot with his dance productions, and rocketed to global giga-fame. There, in the heart of the seething spectacle of pyrotechnics, screaming crowds, private jets and oafish “EDM” culture was sad, lost Tim: socially awkward, unsure of his own abilities, worked relentlessly by a voracious industry and eventually drinking himself to Read more ...
David Nice
There was a special celebratory aura to the start of Swedish city Gothenburg's first Point Festival. Earlier in the week its Symphony Orchestra's Chief Conductor, electrifying Finn Santtu-Matias Rouvali, had not only announced a renewed contract there but also been appointed to the same position with our own Philharmonia Orchestra, to succeed Esa-Pekka Salonen. Further excitement was further guaranteed by the fact that two of the world's finest ensembles, the GSO and violinist-genius Terje Tønnesen's uniquely innovative Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, would share five of the 11 major events, all Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
Many groups have based their career focusing almost completely on one thing and evermore honing it. Bands ranging from The Ramones to the Cocteau Twins to the Black Keys to even the Foo Fighters could arguably be said to follow this remit. Swedish metallers Amon Amarth certainly do. Since 1992 they have been creating Viking-themed metal and for their eleventh album, they are not about to change things.Amon Amarth began at a time when Scandinavian death metal was mired in real darkness and controversy, but, although born of that scene, their sound blossomed into something much more crowd- Read more ...
joe.muggs
On his second album, Swedish star DJ Kornél Kovács has achieved the impossible and made “tropical house” interesting. Somehow, he's taken every cliché of that slow, lilting pop dance sound Drake and lifestyle influencers Instagramming from pristine beaches and tweaked them to find unexpected strangeness and depths. All the tinkling marimbas, autotuned crooning (from pop duo Rebecca & Fiona), loping Latin/dancehall rhythms and pristine cleanliness you'll know from a million radio hits are here, but there's also an insidiously hallucinatory approach to the fine detail.Tiny little bleeps and Read more ...
David Thompson
"One talks, the other doesn’t" is about as crude a description as could be of the Swedish masterpiece, Persona. Profoundly experimental even today, Ingmar Bergman’s film was at base about the intense, vampiric encounter between a mute actress suffering a breakdown and the garrulous nurse assigned to care for her. The roles respectively announced the arrival of one fine actress, Liv Ullmann, and confirmed the brilliance of another, Bibi Andersson. Andersson later recounted that Bergman told her the silent role had to go to Ullmann as the less experienced of the two, with the assurance Read more ...
mark.kidel
1957 was a busy year for a very busy director: Ingmar Bergman made two of his most famous films – The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, several TV dramas, and a number of major stage productions. All the while, he was suffering from painful stomach ulcers, juggling a number of love affairs and breaking through, after a decade of increasingly accomplished and controversial films, as one of the leading film-makers in the world.Jane Magnusson’s documentary uses this annus mirabiliis as a thread for a film that explores the entirety of the Swedish master’s life. All of Bergman’s films are in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
This might just be the most challenging film review I’ve had to write in decades. The best thing would be to go and see Border knowing nothing more than that it won the prize for most innovative film at Cannes. Don't watch the trailer, and definitely don’t read those lazy reviewers who complete their word count by writing a detailed synopsis ruining every reveal and plot twist. Border is simply brilliant and best seen clean, although a duty of care means that viewers of a delicate disposition are warned that there’s a significant amount of body horror on screen. Fans of David Cronenberg, Read more ...
stephen.walsh
Why is Un Ballo in maschera not as popular as the trio of Verdi masterpieces – Rigoletto, Traviata, Trovatore – that, with a couple of digressions, preceded it in the early 1850s? Its music is scarcely less brilliant than theirs, and if its plot is on a par of absurdity with Trovatore’s, it is at least, on the whole, more fun. One problem might be a certain thinness in the portraiture, as if Verdi was more interested in the incidents than in his characters. In his new production for WNO, David Pountney seems to interpret this as a sort of meta-theatricality, an opera watching itself being Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
A bunch of young-ish people stuck in a rambling house in the middle of nowhere, a hatchet-faced senior citizen guarding a hoard of murky secrets, assorted missing persons, a derelict sanatorium, lots of creepy noises and no telephones… hang on, isn’t that exactly the same formula as in the first series of Black Lake? The sense of deja vu in this second season was further enhanced by the presence of Johan (Filip Berg), the arrogant young businessman who was planning to buy the haunted ski resort in series one.The reason Johan has managed to return from the dead is that this is a prequel, and Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
Although both are Swedish, this particular Majken has nothing to do with the pop-reggae-ska band Majken Tajken which has issued a couple of albums. The singular Majken – Anna Majken to her family – is from Malmö and Young Believer is her debut album. Instead of setting up a shuffling groove like the band, she’s a singer-songwriter whose downbeat songs are infused with her harp playing and a careworn, cracked voice suggesting she’s older than Father Time. Titles like “This War Belongs to You”, “Oak Bench Birch Grave” and “Oh Mighty Discomfort” telegraph Young Believer’s concerns with life’s Read more ...