Critics reviews

It’s harsh, sarcastic, unsparing, threatening, unfair, and messed up. While it is formally rather controlled, it is also a cauldron of bad feelings and bad faith.

As with his previous films Play(2011) and Force Majeure (2014), Ostlund uses his setting to explore hidden inequalities in supposedly liberal societies, particularly those concerning masculinity, race and class, playing with our expectations about what is supposed to happen versus the results, which are always uncomfortable.

With a strong and humorous opening, The Square quickly loses its wit as it descends into aimless anger and condescension. . . . But while the film's opening satirises the bourgeois art world, its edge is blunted by a constant mockery of everyone and everything.

The Square is a satire of the art-world in all its overblown inanity and as a satire it accomplishes little more than leaving a few dead fish in a barrel, but I thought the best way to appreciate it—or to rationalize it—is as a multi-roomed art exhibit itself. . . . For me, The Square had more hits than misses, but as a social satire I'll admit it did seem rather glib.

Claes Bang gives an exceptional comic and dramatic performance as Christian, the long-suffering, hapless director of a contemporary art museum in Stockholm. The movie is a wild, suspenseful satire of the art world that's also a cringe comedy: Östlund, the audacious provocateur who most recently gave us FORCE MAJEURE, a withering comedy of manners about masculinity, cheerfully accepts a definition of his aesthetic as a cross between Larry David and Michael Haneke.

Upon this by-definition blank slate, Östlund will build his precarious tower of a social critique, in which warring elements—narrative, visual, aural—are increasingly balanced upon one another until it's about to topple . . .This would all seem to fall in line with recent trends in art-film satire . . . yet The Square is an altogether looser affair, finding ways to shimmy around its stuffy setting rather than feeling trapped in it.

The conceptual-fish-in-a-barrel potshots at contemporary art alternate with an ostensible critique of masculinity and privilege, building to a climax that endorses a compassion that's mealy-mouthed and insufficient. For all the skill and polish on display, "The Square" is never anything beyond facile and pleased with itself. It says something unsettling about the times that the Palme d'Or was awarded this year at Cannes to a work so flat-out reactionary.

Whether puckish, wry, dry, coy, or cold, these images offer, above all, the conspicuous restraint of aesthetic nonintervention, of falsely bland repudiation of visual expression, as if to let the facts onscreen speak for themselves. But the actual artistic point of these satires on bourgeois comfort and sophistication is a visual simplicity that matches the dramas' repudiations of technological, intellectual, and bureaucratic modernity.

This movie is more sprawling than Ostlund's last feature, the superb 2014 Force Majeure, but he's still an engaging mischief-maker. The title may in fact be a winking work of nonrepresentational art itself. A square has a defined border. The movie Ostlund has made is adamantly open-ended. There are no right angles and no right answers.

The art world is a soft target for satire, not least because the art world's appetite for satire of itself is limitless... It's unreasonable to expect any satire of the art world to be fresh, since knowingness is the first requirement to get in the door. The Square won the Palme d'Or at Cannes this spring not because it lashes the art world in a new way, but because Östlund delivers his lashings so exquisitely.

It all manages, despite its efforts to appear otherwise, to fall just short of genuine self-excoriation. This being a movie about the art world and the upper crust, it's in some ways a movie about Östlund himself. Yet the director somehow manages not to get caught under his own microscope. I walked away from the movie both times thinking, "So, then, what about this movie?" He's a good enough director to distract you from that for most of the movie's two-hour-and-32-minute runtime, however.

Among its many virtues, The Square is a funny movie. The video that the viral gurus create, featuring a homeless girl and a ticking clock, offers one of the biggest laughs of the year. And Östlund is a master of the buzzkill, undercutting liberal piety and masculine vanity with relish... There is a tension here between that earnestness and Östlund's rigorous, calculating mind that can be confounding—and, given the film's subject, may in the end be poignant.