Sweden
Saskia Baron
My Life as a Dog is a bittersweet coming-of-age yarn which took Sweden and the art cinema circuit by storm on its release in 1985. Anton Glanzelius plays Ingemar, the 12-year-old narrator with a pixie-faced charm; his mother has TB and is exhausted and exasperated with both him and his older brother who constantly fight and mess up their cramped apartment. It’s 1958 and there’s no father on the scene, so Ingemar is sent away to live with his uncle. He finds himself in a backwater in rural Småland which seems to be overrun with eccentrics: a sculptor dreaming that his nude statue of a Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
So here’s the thing: a heavily pregnant woman is hanging by her ankles above a raging torrent. Two teens, one with a broken arm, are stuck down a well. And 15 miners, deep below ground, take refuge from a fire in an emergency chamber, unaware it has been sabotaged by the serial killer among them, who then, using “a gadget”, proceeds to switch off the mine’s pumps so they will all slowly drown.It seems Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein – whose baby Midnight Sun (Sky Atlantic) is – have long had water on the brain. Eight weeks ago, when their Franco-Swedish thriller began with a man in a suit tied Read more ...
Mark Sanderson
You can just hear Måns Mårlind and Björn Stein, the clever-sick Swedes behind Midnight Sun, cackling as they cooked up the pre-title sequence to the first episode of their new series. A grizzled man in a grey suit wakes up to find himself strapped to a helicopter rotor-blade. The engine starts. What follows is enough to give anyone quite a turn.Blood and vomit are everywhere in this curtain-raiser. Rutger Burlin (Peter Stormare), the initial investigator, throws up twice (the human fall-out is disgusting) and his deputy’s daughter yawns in Technicolor all over her daddy, having over-indulged Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For many, music is simply background, blurring tinnily from phones, sense-candy to “Like”, swipe and scroll alongside Pokemon and Snapchat. Music is content, filling digital space in the same way Polyfilla fills dents in walls. Zara Larsson epitomises this. Hers is the sound of nothing happening, albeit to a relentless masturbatory tang of gossipy sex obsession. Her second album is a void in the human soul.Larsson came to prominence on her native Sweden’s version of Britain’s Got Talent in 2008, aged only 10, and has been a star there ever since. As well as guesting for Tinie Tempah and David Read more ...
David Nice
What's a world-renowned mezzo-soprano in her middle years to do? Slimline of voice, tall and handsome in person with piercing and slightly intimidating blue eyes, Stockholm-born Anne Sofie von Otter isn't likely to sing what is known in the operatic world as "all those old bag parts", though she's a good enough actress to have carried off a few.Yet this is one of the widest-ranging and most recorded voices of the past 25 years (over 100 CDs to date). From Mozart's Idamante and Sesto in ground-breaking 1990 concert performances to a grande dame in meltdown as part of Thomas Adès's superb Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The Emigrants and The New Land have to be seen. In each, the story is gripping, the acting marvellous and the depiction of the period setting evocative and flawless. Any of these aspects would be reason enough to see a film, but the clincher is director Jan Troell’s adeptness at showing how the smallest details impact on destiny. Taking a moment’s rest from a menial task on a farm can lead to consequences which colour a whole life. But this is not where it stops. Troell weaves such moments seamlessly into a grand, sweeping arc for which the only word is epic. Striking the balance between the Read more ...
Nick Hasted
A woman cowers beneath her bedclothes, building a useless barrier against the thing she hears creeping and scraping across the room, the thing that only appears when she turns off the light. This is the most primal image of domestic terror in the homemade short film whose viral success took its Swedish director, David F Sandberg, to Hollywood.The full-scale expansion of Lights Out he made there has a similarly effective moment, when its young heroine Rebecca (Teresa Palmer) awakes to the sound of long nails dragging along her bedroom floor, where a shadowy, long-haired figure hunches. And if Read more ...
David Nice
Superior light music with a sting, done at the highest level: what could be better for a summer lunchtime in the light and airy Cadogan Hall? Our curator was that most collegial of top soloists, trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger. He'd invited colleagues of many nations, all of them first rate, but it was almost a given that chansonnier-composer HK Gruber would steal the show.That's not to undervalue Hardenberger's own unique contributions, kicking off as piccolo trumpeter with Academy of St-Martin-in-the-Fields strings in the fireworks-strut of fellow Swede Tobias Broström's Sputnik. Jan Lundgren' Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The story of Queen Christina Vasa of Sweden has been told in opera, novels and on stage. It was first addressed by cinema in 1933 when Greta Garbo played the title role in Rouben Mamoulian’s Queen Christina. Liv Ullmann then took the part in 1974’s The Abdication.The reasons for the persistent attraction to the story are clear. Christina was six when her father King Gustav II Adolph was killed in battle in 1632. Queen at 18, she studied voraciously and wanted knowledge and literacy for all. In thrall to the ideas of Descartes, she brought him to Sweden. She did not obediently accept Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
A Venn diagram connecting the diffuse, distanced and drifting, The Amazing's Ambulance is hard to latch onto. Its first five tracks are etiolated cousins of the Midlake of Antiphon, while also calling to mind Sydney dream-popsters The Church circa Heyday and Starfish, as well as fellow Australians The Moffs. Although beautiful, their vaporousness makes it difficult to keep them in focus. Then, as the seven-and-a-half minute “Through City Lights” progresses, any hold on the ear dissipates. The subsequent pair of acoustic guitar-centred tracks feel tacked on and, as attention has already Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The indie scene isn’t currently enjoying a peak period but FEWS’ debut album, Means, which came out a couple of months back, makes as close a case for tight, post-punk guitar songs played by skinny guys as anything released this year. Part of this is undoubtedly down to producer Dan Carey, whose work with multiple acts, from Bat For Lashes to Kate Tempest to Bloc Party, shows he knows how to capture the best of an artist. But last night the Sweden-based four-piece had to prove they could hack out a persuasive live set on their own.First a word about the venue. The Prince Albert pub, just down Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
This concluding mini-series starring the sorrowful Swede began with a bizarre misfire set in South Africa, but redeemed itself with a finale imbued with persuasively Wallander-ish characteristics. The light was grey, flat and menacing. Landscape shots stretched lugubriously as far as the eye could see, encompassing forbidding lakes, shivering forests and damp fields.Meanwhile, Wallander himself was steadily falling apart. This closing story, "The Troubled Man" (★★★★), reached back into the Cold War past and the ambivalent obscurities of espionage and subterfuge, which writer Peter Read more ...