SunnyHello Nice effects though.

Steineded How sad is this?

Platicsco Good story, Not enough for a whole film

Matylda Swan It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties.

johnnyboyz "Sweden!" cried out President Donald Trump some time ago. 'Just look at what has happened in Sweden!' he seemed to proclaim again. But what did he mean? "Play" is the title of a devilish Ruben Östlund film; a strange amalgamation of "La Haine" and "Funny Games" which combines cinema vérité with psychological horror and social commentary. What social commentary, it seems, is left up to the viewer: audiences have appeared to whittle it down to one of two (but it could be both) things: class and ethnicity, with Swedish politicians even finding time to chip in to make thoughts known - do remarks by socialists expunge the film from charges of racism when they proclaim it is about class? Or is "Play" so clever, that they have entirely missed the fact it is a damning critic of multiculturalism.The film opens in a shopping centre with a disagreement between two Swedish boys over an amount of money one of them has dropped and lost. "500 Krona!?" one of them exclaims - 'it's nothing', replies the other. Across the way, however, a gang of black youths who are mostly their age are eyeing them up in order to essentially mug them. Within the first scene, Östlund wants us to realise this is a society characterised by differences in income and racial disparity.Elsewhere in the film is the lament that authority has disappeared from Swedish society: bus conductors; mall security guards and shop assistants are either powerless to giving louts a good whack or vacant altogether, save for nearer the very end where they exasperatingly appear at just the wrong moment to punish the wrong people. The film enjoys its static camera-work and neo-realistic settings, wherein dozens of people wander around the public domain, but what seems to have been deliberately kept of screen above all else is the presence of a policeman. Where this seems to lead, or will eventually lead, is an increase in vigilantism - parents and friends of those already victim to spates of crime taking matters into their own hands and administering their own forms of justice in the absence of a state enforcing the law: not unlike various London communities forced into defending themselves form the hordes in 2011, or other groups trying to do something about paedophile gangs operating under the radar in northern England. There are two instances of this in "Play", one closing the film which doubly encompasses Sweden's apparent ignorance to what is going on amongst its young that someone is labelled a racist for trying to obtain justice. "Play" depicts a couple of hours in the life of three boys in the city of Gothenburg and its outskirts on a grey winter's day - they are Sebastian; Alex and John, although John is of Chinese ethnicity. Whatever the problem with immigration, or immigrant crime waves specifically, John has at least seemingly integrated. When we first encounter them, they are at the offices where one of their mothers works - an upscale law firm (we can read "Adact" on the wall) whose employees dress impeccably. Östlund loiters on the entrance of the office for a while after everyone has departed, almost pointlessly, until a staffer reveals the practice to be so bourgeois that they wipe clean a glass door that was already in perfect condition. Sebastian et al. traverse to the local shopping mall, where the earlier group of black youths are still messing around having failed to lull the twosome from the opening scene into what will transpire to be a psychologically sadistic game of bullying and robbery. The two groups first come into contact in a sports shop, where Östlund quite brilliantly keeps the coloured gang off-screen as they holler and whoop while we focus on our increasingly anxious protagonists. By the time they have been followed outside and onto the tram home, it is evident something is wrong, and from there transpires the rest of the harrowing tale.The film's beating heart, the idea that bullies belonging to a minority string defenceless white Swedish kids along to mug them, I read is based on a spate of actual incidences of this happening over a three year period. Meanwhile, adults are too ditzy worrying about broken porcelain in cafes and blocked aisles on trains to really notice what's going on. Writers and journalists such as Jonas Hassen-Khemiri and Åsa Linderborg have made accusations, veiled or otherwise, that the film is in some way racist, while America Zavala applauds it for attacking the pitfalls of a system characterised by class. Thematically, the film seems to reach the conclusion that Sweden is a racially and culturally diverse place - whites don dreadlocks and listen to reggae; Native Americans busk in town squares and white girls dance to Zimbabwean pop music for school performance projects. It is, however, experiencing teething problems as it makes some sort of cordial transition into multicultural permanency. When all is said and done, one does not have to do much research to find stories, radiating in particular out of the city of Malmo, which report chaos and a complete social breakdown on account of multi-racial ghettos rioting for reasons that even the police do not know. One may also read of 'no-go' zones and youth criminality in classrooms so rife that schools have even had to shut for periods of time due to teachers feeling unsafe. Whatever the answer to any of this, Östlund has above all other things managed to make something which actually feels like a piece of cinema - something free of convention; something unpredictable and both harrowing and atmospheric without any real need for pyrotechnics. It is wholly worth seeing for these reasons and more.

erdmannmartin Based on real cases from Gothenburg, the director has created an almost documentary-looking study of a youth gangs of black immigrant children who exclude younger white children with all sorts of tricks and "games". The younger children do not fight back and - perfectly educated politically - only symbolically set signs that they want to escape from the subtle captivity of the gang. Of course, adults do not help. After all, you do not want to be a "racist" ..The film creates an oppressive mood through the static wide-angle camera with simultaneous subtle violence. Unwittingly, attitudes, macho, lack of imagination and threats of violence are also shown against adults who threaten politically correct with the police, what the gang kids (10-15 years) smile only tired.Here, the original Swedish openness and Christian expectation developed over centuries meet totally disintegrated immigrant children who are unlikely to be integrated in the next three generations and, as Kant would say, work only with slyness, not reason: love and Being nice means being a weakling - just like the police in Sweden. Because authority means in the context of the gang: violence. So you know it from his tradition.If Östlund's current big movie "the Square" is the grand exposure and dismantling of politically correct comfort, one can see the same direction in "Play", only from the perspective of the street: what is going wrong in a society of total anti-discrimination, in which is only abstracted without examining the facts? The end is unbelievably apt and represents the verdict on the concrete facts: A reverse racism breaks down, destroys society and the quality of culture. The last music scenes of the film leave the audience dejected ...Sweden has a new Ingmar Bergman who can display the individual human relationship at the same time oppressive from a political point of view.

paul2001sw-1 Teenage boys can be horrible: watching 'Play' brought back shuddering memories from my own childhood. In 'Play', the horror is made more interesting by being set against a background of differential affluence and a racial divide; the fine line between "play" and pure bullying is also nicely explored. But it's a slow film, with no rapid cutting or background music: indeed, it's shot in a strange manner with static cameras often leaving part of the subject (or even parts of the subjects, heads for example) off screen. The result gives you the feeling of an by-stander, overhearing parts of somebody else's story; eventually, the tension builds, but it feels like a deliberately off-putting way to make a movie. At the end, I didn't know quite what to think about it: one can alternatively feel repelled by, and sympathetic to, its protagonists, but the surely intentional absence of a clear moral or emotional message means the film ends nowhere. Perhaps we're meant to leave this movie pondering matters of class and race; I left it just glad I'm not fourteen any more.

dinoschreuder-27025 A very thought provoking bleak representation of modern life for many young males. The fly on the wall style filming takes away the emotion of the impact of the events on the group of boys. It is very brave and potentially controversial in its representation of different socio-economic and ethnic groups. For that reason the film maker needed to film it in an understated way. I think the penultimate scene is brilliant. Although the film is set in Sweden it could have been set in many cities in North Western Europe. The film lacks pace makes it a difficult film for Audiences to engage with. The apparent limited use of conventional editing camera angles and post production techniques reinforces its attempt at making it an honest representation.