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So much of [Force majeure's] volatile action remains just under the surface, in the form of flaws, misunderstandings, festering resentments. In this, and many other ways, it resembles that other Scandinavian phenomenon My Struggle, and I have to imagine that, if he saw this movie, Karl Ove Knausgaard must have enjoyed watching this perfect Swedish family disintegrate like so much rotten Ikea particleboard.

[Beyond the Lights] has to fight for the spotlight in a strong week for arthouse releases, none better than Ruben Östlund's wickedly pointed family-crisis comedy Force Majeure, in which the Swede's preoccupation with the warped moral subtext of everyday human behaviour finds its most broadly entertaining narrative to date.

Writer/director Ruben Östlund's ski-resort comedy of social/psychological unease tries to operate at high altitude in more ways than one, aiming somewhere between early Mike Leigh and middle Michael Haneke. In ski parlance, Double Black Diamond terrain: experts only. But this tale of a holidaying Swedish family's escalating ordeal rife with mishap and dysfunction only intermittently soars — Blue Square stuff at best.

This masterful drama piles complex emotions--shame, fear, embarrassment, anguish--on top of one another and then, amazingly, finds a way to somehow mine the most emotionally excruciating moments for a vein of rich, black comedy.

The execution is fresh and inventive, from its casting through to its script (those multi-couple dialogues!) enforced by flawless camerawork and editing. There is a complex psychological depth underpinning every gag and seemingly superficial situation. No on-screen confrontation is accidental and all of them masterfully timed.

Östlund has claimed that his goal in making Force Majeure was to increase the divorce rate. What separates the film from the simplicity of that ambition (and from the work, for instance, of a filmmaker like Michael Haneke) is the ambivalence pulsing under every scene. It is this extraordinarily human quality that lifts and complicates Force Majeure, causing what could have been another bleak indictment to all but vibrate.

There is an off-putting sense that Östlund has stacked the deck against Tomas to make a point or two about a generation gone soft, about men who have become fathers without having grown up themselves. When Tomas and Ebba have drinks with an unfortunate couple staying in the same hotel, the questioning of Tomas's adequacy infects the other pair of lovers, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? style. It's more than a bit schematic.

Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure is also too long, but it's bigger fault is that it borrows the central premise of Julia Loktev's far superior The Loneliest Planet (2011) and then turns that film's greatest strength – subtext expressed through ambiguous gestures – into pages and pages of festival-friendly, on-the-nose text. At least it's funny.

With all respect to David Fincher's Gone Girl, Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure is the best formalist black comedy about marriage since Eyes Wide Shut (1999)... It's no small wonder that in place of a strident think-piece about what happens when an external crisis knocks a nuclear family sideways, Östlund offers a much wryer, individualized portrait of a clan unconsciously asserting its eccentricities in the face of primal forces.

If Michael Haneke were recruited to direct an American sitcom pilot, the results might look something like this Swedish feature, about an upper-middle-class family vacationing unhappily in the French Alps. Like Haneke, writer-director Ruben Östlund (Play) employs eerily controlled long takes to conjure an air of doom around his characters, yet beneath the commanding surfaces lie some rather basic observations about marriage, parenting, and social conformism.

Little but the children's fear of their parents' separation has any dramatic weight. Östlund's crisp, repressed direction is itself a stereotype, and his teasing script and convenient resolutions offer only superficial ironies. A peculiarly haunting ending offers more mystery and curiosity in a single shot than does the entire story that precedes it.

Though it touches upon the comedy of remarriage film, the family vacation film, the bourgeois critique film, and the male-id exposé film, Force Majeure is nonetheless first and foremost something like a science-fiction object, the kind of thing that some heretofore-undetermined future intelligent species might ponder over in collective amusement.