movie review the square

Advertisement

Supported by

Review: ‘The Square’ Takes Aim at Art, Sex, Money and More

• Share full article

By A.O. Scott

• Oct. 26, 2017

At a crucial, uncomfortable, revealing moment in “The Square” — though just about any scene in the nearly two and a half hours of this movie from Ruben Ostlund might fit that description — the hero apologizes. His name is Christian, he’s played by the lean and handsome actor Claes Bang, and he’s the chief curator at an important Stockholm museum. Christian has done something that seemed like a good idea at the time, but it made someone else unhappy enough to threaten vengeance, and now Christian is truly sorry. So he does what any decent person would, which is make a video mea culpa on his phone and send it to his victim.

But it’s not so simple. While Christian is willing to admit fault, he also feels compelled to note that the problem isn’t just a matter of his own thoughtlessness. (I’m refraining from saying what he did, since, like everything else that happens in “The Square,” it’s too surprising to spoil and too weird to explain.) There are social forces and economic structures at work, he says, large historical tendencies that both extend and extenuate his guilt. Immigration. Inequality. Social alienation. Global capitalism. That kind of thing. Christian knows a billionaire — a donor to the museum — who might be able to throw enough money at the problem to solve it. But even then …

Is there a saying about fish that live in glass barrels shooting themselves in the foot? Mr. Ostlund, whose film before this one was the squirmy, incisive “Force Majeure,” takes aim at some pretty fat satirical targets — art, taste, sex and money, for starters — and sprays buckshot at the audience as well as in his own face. The bad conscience of the cultural elite is hardly a new concern in European cinema (or American journalism, if we want to go there), and “The Square,” which won the Palme d’Or in May, uses some of the shock-the-bourgeoisie tactic refined, in recent years, by his fellow Cannes laureates Michael Haneke and Lars von Trier.

If Mr. Ostlund lacks Mr. Haneke’s rigor and Mr. von Trier’s sadism , he at least has a sense of humor. “The Square,” ragged and headlong, plays like a series of elaborately staged sketch-comedy routines. Or, closer to its own concerns, like an anthology of performance art pieces. Just about everything that happens to Christian has a conceptual dimension, an element of coy self-consciousness, that makes you wonder whether it’s just something that happened or a carefully planned and theorized happening.

Literally speaking, of course, the movie is a string of such events, though it manages to fool, or at least to tease, the characters as well as the viewers. The robbery that sets the main plot in motion seems at first like an art-world provocation, and before he quite understands what has happened, Christian experiences the kind of thrill that art is supposed to elicit. His one night stand with an American journalist (Elisabeth Moss) is not so thrilling, but its very awkwardness has an arch, knowing quality. Staff meetings at the museum have a similar feel. Is the baby whom one of Christian’s colleagues brings into the room really his child? Is its presence a commentary on the persistence of innocence in a fallen world? What about Christian’s own daughters? Can any human action or feeling be called natural or real?

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .

• Login / Sign Up
• Awards Shows

The Square's high-concept comedy targets both the art world and the social contract

Uncomfortable and hilarious, the critically praised satirical film asks what we owe one another.

by Alissa Wilkinson

If, as the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, then The Square ’s Christian ( Claes Bang ) is headed straight to Hades. But then again, the movie would like to remind us, the rest of us are right behind him.

Ruben Östlund ( Force Majeure ) won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May for The Square , his high-concept takedown of our high-minded ideals and the myriad ways we flub them in execution. Burying self-referential allusions in the background and merrily poking viewers till they bruise, The Square at times feels more like longform performance art than a narrative film. It’s social satire by way of art-world comedy, and no woke participant is exempt from its barbs.

Does that sound like heaven, as it does to me? Then The Square is extremely your movie. Those less excited by the prospect of nerding out on social theory and wryly barbed situational humor may find themselves checking their watches — but even when it seems aimless, The Square is compulsively watchable.

The Square jabs spikily at both contemporary art and the world around it

Christian is the sophisticated, handsome, and very earnest chief curator of a (fictional) contemporary art museum in Stockholm. It’s the kind of museum familiar to a certain kind of urbanite: spare, glossy, designed for large-scale idea-driven exhibitions and enlightening talks with visiting artists. It houses, for instance, an installation called “Mirrors and Piles of Gravel,” which consists of exactly what it sounds like, accompanied by all-caps neon wording that reads YOU HAVE NOTHING.

Even people who love this stuff can sometimes have a hard time taking it completely seriously, but Christian seems determined to do just that. He’s particularly excited about an upcoming exhibition called “The Square,” which examines social norms and aims to create a radical space “of trust and caring.” The exhibition pushes visitors to think about how they relate to those around them by migrating what happens outside the museum walls inside — a topic called “relational aesthetics.” ( This is a real thing .)

The Square takes this exhibition as its sly symbolic theme, popping squares (mostly paintings and architectural framings) behind Christian when he gets stuck in the middle of an ethical quandary, which is often. He’s a man with a lot of very liberal-minded notions about empathy, compassion, and equality who keeps running into walls when interacting with real-life people.

The largest of these walls appears right at the beginning of the film, when, on his way to work, he is stopped in the middle of a town square by a woman fleeing a man and decides to help her, only to discover later that he’s been the target of a con. He decides to fight back. It doesn’t go well.

Christian has largely kept his life humming along by compartmentalization, putting his ideals in one box, his fathering in another, his work in another, his sex life in another, and so on — an exercise in abstraction, which keeps life clean of messy personal ties and emotions. Emotions and empathy aren’t really his thing. He can’t seem to remember women’s names. He’s self-involved enough to hurriedly approve a heinous advertising campaign without realizing how bad it will be. He has to practice speeches in which he will appear to spontaneously ditch his notes and “speak from the heart” in the bathroom mirror beforehand.

That kind of tendency toward abstraction is clearly an asset his professional life, in a field where jargon roams free. When he’s interviewed about his work and the exhibition by a journalist named Anne ( Elisabeth Moss ), he resorts to the kind of explanation that sounds like word salad; when she reads to him a curator’s statement she found on the museum’s website, something about “Exhibition / Non-Exhibition,” even he can’t really explain it.

There is a utility to the weirdness of the discourse around contemporary art, of course, as long as you already speak the language. The fondness for making self-contradictory statements — for saying a work of art is, say, “real and not real” — comes from a deep-rooted desire among artists and curators to keep art from having just one takeaway. Most contemporary art wants to make the viewer uncomfortable.

But we get the feeling that until now, Christian’s finely tuned ability to speak the language of contemporary art has turned into a way to avoid reality. He doesn’t seem terribly connected to his children, nor does he seem to have a lot of friends. His employees seem surprised when he addresses them directly. When he sleeps with Anne (in one of cinema’s funniest, least sexy sex scenes ever), it’s not emotional and barely even transactional; he can’t get out of his own head.

That disconnection from others is, somewhat ironically, in direct contradiction to his beloved “relational aesthetics,” which tries to break barriers between human social interactions and the traditionally isolated contexts in which art is shown and experienced.

The film takes that to heart. It isn’t just interested in the art world, after all. It takes on, by turns, the family, the neighborhood, the professional environment, the bedroom, the mall, and the world of social media (including the requisite pitchfork-toting mobs). It’s a whirlwind tour through the ways we interact with one another and, more importantly, the ways we fail to do it with anything approaching competence.

The Square is a twisted attempt to crack the social contract

The Square is loaded with ideas — maybe too loaded. It’s a little hard to know at times whether the film is sincerely trying to explore those ideas or make fun of the idea of trying, or maybe both. Every scene can be picked apart for what it says, or seems to want to say, about how humans relate to one another through speech, through art, through nonverbal communication, through tacitly agreed-upon social cues, through trust (or its lack). Civil society is but a thin veneer over a more animal reality, The Square seems to say, backing it up with an excruciating scene in which a performance artist ( Terry Notary ) breaks down the barriers between man and animal in a room full of black-tied cosmopolitans. The social contract is about a strong as a bit of thread.

That critique is extra barbed in the context of the sophisticated contemporary art world, with its finely tuned hierarchies and purposely walled-off institutions. The perverseness of a field that practically defines the idea of “elite” yet also often tries to protest that it’s for everyone is the main locus of Östlund’s jabs, though he’s not really suggesting we ought to burn it all down. The Square , after all, premiered at Cannes — a festival literally closed to the public — and won the poshest of posh film prizes. It’s more of an inside ballgame, high art making cracks about high art and the people who make it and watch it, including everyone watching this movie.

But The Square doesn’t get so high on its own heady supply that it forgets to be funny. It is very funny, though often through a dark lens. When Anne confronts Christian about their night together, it’s in a gallery containing some kind of installation that appears to be a giant pile of chairs, which keeps rattling loudly and interrupting their conversation at a regular interval, and it’s exactly the dose of comedy that keeps the scene light. One moment, in which a chef hollers for a stampede of museum donors at a dinner to stop moving so he can meekly tell them the buffet’s offerings, is one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a movie.

Ideas rule the day, though; every scene in The Square has an implicit idea about power dynamics and social norms, even the funny ones. (The odd effect is that The Square feels overstuffed, but it’s almost impossible to imagine what you’d take out — not, perhaps on purpose, unlike some big crowded art museums.) A scene in which a visiting artist ( Dominic West ) giving a talk is interrupted repeatedly by a man in the audience with Tourette’s syndrome, and the whole room struggles to figure out how exactly they’re supposed to react, plays as both satire and comedy — and we’re obviously meant to be laughing at the audience, not the man with Tourette’s. But we’re in the audience too. They’re not the only uncomfortable ones.

Östlund’s point seems to be that what makes us human is less about our capacity for empathy and more about how uncomfortable we get when cracks appear in the trust that keeps us from tearing each other apart. Our good, liberal-minded intentions for making a better world are rarely enough to keep us from our baser instincts, The Square suggests, when things really get down to brass tacks. Underneath all the trappings of civilization, we maintain those bare animal drives: rage, anger, lust, territorialism.

Then, with a wink and a grin, the film turns around and tests out its own ideas on us, bouncing on the implicit trust between audience and filmmaker, daring us to see just how far we’ll go along with it. If you ask me, it’s worth going along for the ride.

The Square premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May and opens in limited theaters on October 27.

More in this stream

Most Popular

• One chart shows how Hurricane Helene could turn into a monstrous storm
• Sign up for Vox’s daily newsletter
• 7 questions — and zero conspiracy theories — about the allegations against Sean “Diddy” Combs
• The ugly reality behind Tim Walz’s farm-friendly image
• Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Awards Shows

A minor upset for Best Comedy Series couldn’t keep the rest of the night from feeling predictable.

The CMA snub just proves what Beyoncé was trying to tell us all along.

Everyone is misquoting Jonathan Glazer’s speech at the Academy Awards.

What Best Picture winner Oppenheimer gets right — and wrong — about the threat of nuclear weapons.

From Jimmy Kimmel to going to bed on time, the 2024 Oscars were a hit.

The Best Supporting Acting Oscars are always a little wacky, because … what do they mean?

Log in or sign up for Rotten Tomatoes

Trouble logging in?

By continuing, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes and to receive email from the Fandango Media Brands .

By creating an account, you agree to the Privacy Policy and the Terms and Policies , and to receive email from Rotten Tomatoes.

Email not verified

Let's keep in touch.

Sign up for the Rotten Tomatoes newsletter to get weekly updates on:

• Upcoming Movies and TV shows
• Rotten Tomatoes Podcast
• Media News + More

By clicking "Sign Me Up," you are agreeing to receive occasional emails and communications from Fandango Media (Fandango, Vudu, and Rotten Tomatoes) and consenting to Fandango's Privacy Policy and Terms and Policies . Please allow 10 business days for your account to reflect your preferences.

OK, got it!

• About Rotten Tomatoes®
• Login/signup

Movies in theaters

• Opening This Week
• Top Box Office
• Coming Soon to Theaters
• Certified Fresh Movies

Movies at Home

• Fandango at Home
• Prime Video
• Most Popular Streaming Movies
• What to Watch New

Certified fresh picks

• 98% The Wild Robot Link to The Wild Robot
• 100% Girls Will Be Girls Link to Girls Will Be Girls
• 100% Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story Link to Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

New TV Tonight

• 100% Colin from Accounts: Season 2
• 100% Matlock: Season 1
• 100% Brilliant Minds: Season 1
• 71% Murder in a Small Town: Season 1
• 50% Rescue: HI-Surf: Season 1
• -- Grotesquerie: Season 1
• 95% Nobody Wants This: Season 1
• -- Everybody Still Hates Chris: Season 1
• -- Doctor Odyssey: Season 1
• -- Social Studies: Season 1

Most Popular TV on RT

• 94% The Penguin: Season 1
• 83% Agatha All Along: Season 1
• 65% The Perfect Couple: Season 1
• 67% Mr. McMahon: Season 1
• 86% High Potential: Season 1
• 50% Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story: Season 2
• 100% Slow Horses: Season 4
• 100% From: Season 3
• Best TV Shows
• Most Popular TV

Certified fresh pick

• 83% Agatha All Along: Season 1 Link to Agatha All Along: Season 1
• All-Time Lists
• Binge Guide
• Comics on TV
• Five Favorite Films
• Video Interviews
• Weekend Box Office
• Weekly Ketchup
• What to Watch

All Saturday Night Live Movies Ranked

The 100 Best Horror Movies of the 1970s

What to Watch: In Theaters and On Streaming

Awards Tour

Vote in the 1994 Movies Showdown – Round 2

10 Latin Directors to Seek Out and Their Freshest and Hottest Hits

• Trending on RT
• Hispanic Heritage Month
• All SNL Movies Ranked
• Movie Re-Release Calendar
• Most Anticipated TV

The Square Reviews

Östlund has a psychologist’s eye for human nature and the understated comedic touch of Jacques Tati. The end result is akin to virtual slapstick, the emotional equivalent of slipping on a banana peel.

Full Review | Jul 24, 2023

The film’s execution only occasionally reaches its ideological grasp, but Östlund’s such a talented filmmaker that he can cover up the lack of follow-through in his script. That’s tough to do!

Full Review | Nov 10, 2022

The Square foregrounds a dilemma at the core of artistic practice: as moving and influential as it can be, art too often exists in a realm separated from “real life,” cordoned off as safely “consumable” entertainment. —Guest post by Michael Joshua Rowin

Full Review | Jun 10, 2022

Sharpened by a series of corrosive comic moments and provocations, The Square lashes out with a refined blow against both indifference and empty gestures of faux-humanitarianism.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Mar 17, 2022

(...) Östlund makes the extension of performativity something that ends up dislodging the meaning, which pierces the artistic itself, until it reaches the Social. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 8.5/10 | Jan 9, 2021

None of the themes explored in this review required much close analysis. Unlike the knife's edge satire of Force Majeure, The Square is a blunt object. But maybe that's what it takes to point out our world's quotidian surrealism...

Full Review | Dec 11, 2020

Beautifully choreographed and... tweaked but scathingly true to life.

Full Review | Jun 3, 2020

A vision about the high culture and the low culture. The Bourdieu perspective nowadays. A film about our social behavior. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | May 19, 2020

The Square has been called a satire, likely because we haven't developed a popular term for a film that, though drawn in exaggerated lines, at its foundation is hopeless and doesn't mean to teach us anything with its hopelessness.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2020

As much as The Square enjoys poking fun at the buffoonery of the art world, it's more interested in what that world represents: a self-sustaining bubble where money, power, and posturing commingle.

Full Review | Feb 8, 2020

The reason why The Square works so brilliantly with macabre and laughter is that it mirrors what we see and do everyday.

Full Review | Feb 4, 2020

The Square is a bit too cynical for its own good, but reaffirms my belief that the future of cinema can be found in Scandinavia.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 27, 2020

[A] wickedly funny and insightful film.

Full Review | Jan 16, 2020

Ostlund latest satire is as formidably funny as it is a harsh condemnation of estranged humanity.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 10, 2019

The Square is a bizarre film that has it's moments and Claes Bang is very good at playing suave but awkward.

Full Review | Oct 3, 2019

It can be noted that it wants to offer a more global approach, but this is not the feeling that end up being transmitted, and it is a shame. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 7, 2019

With bright moments, 'The Square' seems right and necessary. [Full Review in Spanish]

Full Review | Aug 3, 2019

Don't they know it's the end of the world?

Full Review | Jul 14, 2019

Christian is the affluent chief curator of an elitist Stockholm art museum preparing to mount an exhibition called "The Square" when he is robbed of his phone, his wallet and, incredibly, his cufflinks.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Jul 7, 2019

Ostlund's film carries bizarre and hilarious edges.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Jun 8, 2019

Review: Ruben Östlund’s ‘The Square’ is a virtuoso satire of the modern art world

• Copy Link URL Copied!

The title of “The Square,” the Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund’s savagely entertaining new movie, refers to a 4-by-4-meter illuminated box etched in the cobblestones outside the X-Royal, a venerable if entirely fictional museum of contemporary art in Stockholm. The purpose of this exhibit is to promote a vague, universal notion of human empathy, as summed up by a placard bearing the remarkably straight-faced declaration, “The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring.”

The movie “The Square” may be many things — a high-wire ensemble comedy, a vivid character study, a tirelessly sustained volley of ideas — but it is no one’s idea of sanctuary. When the film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in May, it was both a widely applauded choice and a deliciously ironic one, given how mercilessly the movie skewers the smug, self-congratulatory groupthink that often flourishes in artistic enclaves, the world’s major film festivals very much included.

Now opening theatrically in a new cut that runs a leisurely 151 minutes (four minutes shorter than the version that played at Cannes), “The Square,” which will represent Sweden in the upcoming Oscar race for best foreign-language film, may be addressing a broader, less industry-entangled crowd. But it has lost none of its scalding wit, its disarming playfulness or its ability to blur the lines between viewer discomfort and pleasure.

Östlund’s method, as always, is to stage the human comedy in miniature: Nearly every scene is presented as an impeccably framed tableau, a tactic that effectively transforms characters, extras and audiences alike into participants in a grand sociological study. Flitting from one sly comic digression to the next, the director conducts a broadly satirical investigation of both the modern art world and the troubled conscience of 21st-century Europe, indicting the hollowness lurking beneath its ostensibly progressive, humanist values.

As he demonstrated in his 2014 drama, “Force Majeure,” Östlund is a brilliant anatomist of upper-class male fragility and all-around human selfishness. But he is also a generous and unapologetic entertainer, a provocateur whose cool, clinical touch comes wrapped in seductive compositions (the cinematographer is Fredrik Wenzel) and sharply contoured performances.

The richest of these performances is given by a tall, dark and handsomely stubbled Danish actor named Claes Bang. He plays Christian, the X-Royal’s chief curator, a prominent member of his city’s cultural elite, and a classic Östlundian specimen of privileged heterosexual manhood.

Impeccably styled from his thick-rimmed glasses to his trendy scarves, Christian is the kind of poseur for whom the appearance of spontaneity is invariably the product of careful rehearsal. He’s a local celebrity who likes to guard his privacy, as we learn when some crucial character information is strategically disclosed around the halfway mark.

One of the aims of “The Square” is to lure him out of his white-walled intellectual cocoon. That journey begins when Christian is mugged in broad daylight, losing his cellphone and his wallet to a band of thieves who operate, fittingly enough, like performance artists. With the help of a junior colleague (Christopher Laessø), he tracks the phone to an apartment building in a rough neighborhood, where, in a burst of desperation and callous glee, he executes an ill-advised plot to scare the thieves into giving up their contraband.

But his actions have cruel and unintended consequences, and his attempts to control the fallout only force him to further confront the raw human suffering in his midst. The most vivid face of that suffering turns out to be an angry young boy (a terrific Elijandro Edouard) from the projects, one of a few kids in the movie — a burbling baby, a wailing homeless child — who take turns playing the voice of society’s conscience.

Empathy, charity and concern are qualities that the most enlightened and liberal-minded among us sometimes extol more than they practice.

In other words, “The Square” suggests, empathy, charity and concern are qualities that the most enlightened and liberal-minded among us sometimes extol more than they practice. Christian relishes his position as gatekeeper and the magnetism that it naturally confers, which gets him into some trouble when he begins flirting with an American journalist named Anne (a prickly, vivacious Elisabeth Moss). Their dalliance occasions one of the film’s funniest and ickiest scenes, putting a vigorous carnal riff on the film’s inquiry into the dynamics and inequities of power.

Christian and Anne’s fling is just one sideshow in a movie that takes us on a roving, plot-free tour of the museum’s day-to-day operations. There are easy but priceless sight gags, like an installation that consists entirely of identical piles of granite, some of which are accidentally vacuumed up by the cleaning crew. The camera lingers on meetings where young outside contractors introduce outlandish new marketing strategies, resurrecting the age-old debate of art vs. commerce in the clickbait age.

Some of the sharpest set pieces involve large groups of museum spectators, which allow Östlund to enact his version of Stanley Milgram’s experiments in norm violation and bystander apathy. One especially unnerving scene places us at a swanky gala dinner that is interrupted by a performance artist — played, brilliantly, by the actor and stunt coordinator Terry Notary, whose motion-capture work in the recent “Planet of the Apes” films serves him ferociously well here. There’s a pleasing meta-conceptual joke in the notion that what proves diverting in the context of a simian-themed Hollywood blockbuster might become actively terrifying in real life.

But in taking aim at the human capacity for cowardly groupthink — in suggesting that our species is, in the end, weaker, crueler and less evolved than we think — not every jab in this thoughtful, expansive movie finds its target. In laying a meticulous trap for the viewer, “The Square” at times veers into its own aesthetic and intellectual minefield.

The guilt we are expected to feel when beggars and drifters hobble into the frame might well be answered by skepticism about Östlund’s own dubious calculation, his reluctance to implicate himself or interrogate his own techniques. At times he seems to stretch the boundaries of typical human behavior in order to make a point about it, inviting you to wonder what you would do in his characters’ place.

To even consider that question, of course, is on some level to concede the effectiveness of his manipulations. “The Square” means to send you out of the theater arguing, and its success on that front should not eclipse its more lasting, unsettling achievement. It affirms that art, this movie very much included, can tell us things about ourselves that we’d prefer not to know.

------------

‘The Square’

(In Swedish with English subtitles and English)

Rating: R, for language, some strong sexual content and brief violence

Running time: 2 hours, 31 minutes

Playing: ArcLight Cinemas, Hollywood, and the Landmark Theatre, West Los Angeles

See the most-read stories in Entertainment this hour »

Movie Trailers

[email protected]

@JustinCChang

Has horror become the movie genre of the Trump era?

Review: George Clooney’s racially charged ‘Suburbicon’ is a dreadful movie for dreadful times

Review: Colin Farrell and Nicole Kidman endure a crucible of suffering in ‘The Killing of a Sacred Deer’

More to Read

The Impressionists weren’t just making soft-focus dorm posters. Their vision was radical

Sept. 20, 2024

Review: Even Julia Louis-Dreyfus can’t make ‘Tuesday’ not feel like a Monday

June 14, 2024

Review: In ‘Flipside,’ the untold stories of a wanna-be documentarian coalesce into wisdom

June 7, 2024

Only good movies

Get the Indie Focus newsletter, Mark Olsen's weekly guide to the world of cinema.

You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

Justin Chang was a film critic for the Los Angeles Times from 2016 to 2024. He won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in criticism for work published in 2023. Chang is the author of the book “FilmCraft: Editing” and serves as chair of the National Society of Film Critics and secretary of the Los Angeles Film Critics Assn.

More From the Los Angeles Times

Review: ‘Lee’ and star Kate Winslet bring the WWII photojournalist to hardened, complex life

Sept. 26, 2024

Review: Exquisite ‘The Wild Robot’ uses machines and animals to tell a human story

Hollywood Inc.

We went to a gala for AI-produced movies. Here’s what we saw

From gentle ‘Heartstopper’ to romantic ‘Romeo,’ Kit Connor wants to show his range

Sept. 25, 2024

Most Read in Movies

The trans ‘Will & Grace’ is here, and it’s a Netflix road movie starring Will Ferrell

Sept. 23, 2024

Halle Berry’s ex-husband says she constructed a ‘twisted narrative’ in custody bid

Aug. 28, 2024

• Cast & crew
• User reviews

A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit. A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit. A prestigious Stockholm museum's chief art curator finds himself in times of both professional and personal crisis as he attempts to set up a controversial new exhibit.

• Ruben Östlund
• Elisabeth Moss
• Dominic West
• 225 User reviews
• 284 Critic reviews
• 73 Metascore
• 33 wins & 46 nominations total

Top cast 58

• Boy with Letter
• Dark-Haired Advertising Agent
• Blond Advertising Agent
• Account Manager
• Marketing First Assistant
• Office Worker
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

More like this

Did you know

• Trivia The crowd Oleg was taunting in the dinner scene, throwing water over and pushing around, were in fact drawn from the actual ranks of Sweden's 1 percent, including some of the country's wealthiest art patrons ("They were so into it," Terry Notary said).
• Goofs In the closing titles of "The Girl With A Kitten" clip, the Hebrew version is wrong: the English noun "square" appears in Hebrew as "an open space in a city" rather than "rectangle with all sides equal").

Christian : The Square is a sanctuary of trust and caring. Within it we all share equal rights and obligations.

• Connections Featured in 75th Golden Globe Awards (2018)
• Soundtracks No Good (Extended Mix) Performed by Fedde Le Grand , Ossama Al Sarraf and Ned Shepard (as Sultan + Shepard) Written by Ossama Al Sarraf , James Bratton, Kelly Charles, Robin Morssink, Fedde Le Grand and Ned Shepard

User reviews 225

• Holger-New-Zealand
• Jul 26, 2017
• August 25, 2017 (Sweden)
• Hakka Distribution
• Official Facebook (United Kingdom)
• Gothenburg, Sweden
• Plattform Produktion
• Film i Väst
• Essential Filmproduktion GmbH
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• Oct 29, 2017

Technical specs

• Runtime 2 hours 31 minutes
• Dolby Digital

Related news

Contribute to this page.

• See more gaps
• Learn more about contributing

More to explore

Recently viewed.

Cannes 2017: Ruben Ostlund’s “The Square” wins Palme d’Or

He appeared to break down after failing to secure an Oscar nomination for “ Force Majeure ,” but Ruben Ostlund led the Grand Théâtre Lumière in what he called a “primal scream of happiness,” alluding to a scene in his movie, after he won the Palme d’Or tonight at the 70th Cannes Film Festival for his new film, “The Square.”

“The Square” is a wry and decidedly dark Swedish comedy about an art museum curator (Claes Bang) who is variously forced to contend with a stolen wallet and phone; with trust issues, particularly as they pertain to a one-night stand with a reporter ( Elisabeth Moss ); with a viral-advertising disaster; and with a formal dinner disrupted by a performance artist (motion-capture coach Terry Notary ) who seems to have reverted to a primal state. “The Square” is the first Palme d’Or winner from Sweden since “The Best Intentions” in 1992. 

At the post-awards press conference, where journalists grill the jurors on their choices, the jury’s president, Pedro Almódovar, said he saw the movie as being “about the dictatorship of being politically correct,” something he called as horrifying as any other dictatorship. Jurors also cited the film’s imagination and wit.

At least one other record was set. Sofia Coppola , who won Best Director for “The Beguiled,” became only the second female filmmaker in Cannes history to take that honor, after Yuliya Solntseva in 1961. She wasn’t present at the awards, but in a statement, she thanked her family along with Jane Campion , the only woman to win a Palme d’Or, “for being a role model and supporting woman filmmakers.”

The Grand Jury Prize, or second place, went to Robin Campillo’s “BPM (Beats Per Minute),” a story of AIDS activists in Paris in the early 1990s. At the press conference, one reporter wanted to know why “BPM” hadn’t taken the Palme as so many predicted it would have.

“How many, more or less?” Almodóvar asked, adding, “I loved the movie. Tomorrow perhaps we’ll read in the papers what the rest of the audience thinks of these Palmarès.” He choked up when he began talking about AIDS activists, whom he called heroes who saved many lives. 

Best Actress went to Diane Kruger for her performance in Fatih Akin’s “In the Fade.” She plays a German woman whose son and Turkish husband are killed in a terrorist attack. “I cannot accept this award without thinking of anyone who’s ever been affected by an act of terrorism,” Kruger said, in a festival where the headlines were dominated by news of the Manchester bombing. “Please know that you’re not forgotten.”

Best Actor went to Joaquin Phoenix for “You Were Never Really Here.” He seemed to dwell for a moment before even rising from his seat. “This is totally unexpected,” he said. “You can see from my shoes.” He was wearing black sneakers that were almost certainly a violation of the Lumière’s dress code, which requires black tie for events like the awards ceremony.

Addressing journalists later, he reiterated that he expected his performance, as a laconic war veteran who rescues young women from sex traffickers, to earn him bad reviews. He said he told his girlfriend that coming to the festival would be good, because it would be “really humbling to go through an experience in which you would be unanimously disliked.”

His writer/director, Lynne Ramsay , shared the screenplay prize. In her speech, she noted that she only finished the movie about five days ago. The rush paid off: At least judging from the Screen International scores , “You Were Never Really Here” was one of the two best-reviewed films of the 19 in competition. Ramsay and Phoenix both thanked each other for their respective awards, indicating how crucial each one’s influence was on the other.

Ramsay shared the screenplay prize with Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthymis Filippou (“ The Lobster “), who won for the divisive “The Killing of a Sacred Deer.”

Andrey Zvyagintsev —like Campillo, widely touted as a potential Palme winner—had to settle for the jury prize, effectively third place, for the Russian drama “ Loveless .”

Nicole Kidman , who seemed to be everywhere at Cannes with four titles (“The Beguiled,” “The Killing of a Sacred Deer,” “How to Talk to Girls at Parties,” and season two of “Top of the Lake”), won the special 70th-anniversary prize, a decennial award with few restrictions on who can get it or for what.

Kidman, who was in Nashville today, sent a video of thanks. “The whole experience of last week feels like a dream, actually, and so this is a lovely way to still come back to the dream,” she said.

Cannes is criticized annually for the lack of women among its directors, a criticism that the jurors, when asked about it, suggested was on their minds.

“I do believe that if you have female storytelling you have better female characters,” Jessica Chastain said, noting that she found the representation of women in some of the competition films “quite disturbing.”

Her fellow juror Agnès Jaoui gave a shoutout to the Bechdel test as well as to the “very feminist” men on the jury, including Almodóvar, known for making movies with strong roles for women.

Ben Kenigsberg

Ben Kenigsberg is a frequent contributor to  The New York Times . He edited the film section of  Time Out Chicago  from 2011 to 2013 and served as a staff critic for the magazine beginning in 2006. 

Leave a comment

Related articles.

Fantastic Fest 2024: Bone Lake, Bring Them Down, What Happened to Dorothy Bell?

Fantastic Fest 2024: The Fall, The Birthday, Wake in Fright

Fantastic Fest 2024: Table of Contents

The State of the 2024 Oscar Race

Popular reviews.

Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story

The Way We Speak

Good Bad Things

Hollywood Black

The best movie reviews, in your inbox.