Unfortunately never very funny, didn’t get any big laughs out of me, and the satire is very plain in the first half. The model casting scene, all the dumb phone Instagram bullshit (the pasta picture moment is irredeemably stupid), and a lot of the interactions between the guests and the crew trend towards bland and obnoxious. Some of it is striking though, the “take a swim” scene is uncomfortable and interesting, and the extended dialogue over who should pick up the bill in a relationship is classic, not quite as juicy as you want it to be but it’s still compelling.

I do think this picks up once it hits the halfway mark at the captain’s dinner. The ship swaying in the storm is ominous, the rising tide of seasickness is nasty and fun, Dmitry and the captain having basically a real life boomer Facebook argument as they just spit quotes from other people back and forth instead of having a human discussion, their minds so atrophied from wealth and leisure that they’re incapable of forming their own thoughts, it’s all a big fun sequence. Then when it shifts into night with the storm picking up and this tinny intercom argument, the atmosphere of that is so tense and chilling. This all culminates in the scatalogical flood as the ship’s sewage system — overwhelmed by the seasickness and the choppy waters — erupts. It’s juvenile and grotesque but fuck me it’s a lot of fun to see these dickheads drowning in their own shit and vomit. Then you get the grenade moment which is probably the funniest thing in the movie for me, and that leads into the octopus dinner scene, which is just so satisfying. These people who have been coasting on the labor of others suddenly desperate and starving, but here on this island where there are no bumper guards in play for the materially rich, there’s just no rebuttal to “I did all the work.” It’s a self-evident truth.

After that the movie starts to wear thin again. The relationship between Carl and Abigail is a great place for this movie to arrive at but it’s satisfied to have it just be a funny improbable connection rather than giving it much depth or emotional sincerity which is where I was really hoping it would go. A lot of the other stuff on the island after that first scene is spent just kind of pitter-pattering around until the end, which goes for punchy in a way that undercuts a lot of the more striking and powerful ideas it had built up. I get the point it’s aiming at but it doesn’t hit it for me, and that’s of course not a great note to leave on.

Largely tedious in its opening and closing stretches and on the whole it unfortunately feels like a step back for Östlund after works as accomplished as Force Majeure and The Square, but that chunk in the middle from the captain’s dinner to, hey, the captain’s dinner (isn’t that fun!) is atmospheric and tense and nasty and biting, super satisfying and a ton of fun for that hour or so.