Off to the side of the wickedly funny Swedish black comedy Force Majeure lurks a minor but significant figure with a sour, slightly saturnine face. The man is a cleaner in a fancy French Alps ski hotel and he hardly says a word. But his wordless hovering inspires dread, nervous laughter or both. Which pretty much sums up Force Majeure‘s adroit shifts of tone, and quite possibly its director’s take on the ways of the hip urban bourgeoisie.
Cleaners dig for dirt, and this expressionless snooper keeps popping up to intrude on the unraveling of a seemingly perfect couple. They’re so wrapped up in their bickering efforts to restore equilibrium, they fail to notice that they’ve locked their two young children in a room with a creepy stranger who could pass for an ax murderer.
A successful businessman who seems equally pleased with his good looks and his cell phone, Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) has come to this pricy resort to relax with his trophy wife, Ebba (Lisa Loven Kingsli), and their two children. They make a sleek, perfect domestic unit in a perfect, smooth-running hotel, all clean lines and blond wood.
Well, forget that: Force Majeure is framed around the fast-moving degradation of the couple’s week-long vacation, which heads south after a supposedly controlled explosion backfires, setting off an avalanche that bears down on the family’s patio lunch. Instead of protecting his family, Tomas snatches up his phone and takes off. So much for alpha males, and it’s not over yet.