The Square (Ruben Östlund, 2017)

The curator of a Stockholm art museum meanders through various escapades and trials after his phone and wallet are stolen, distracted enough to neglect the museum's hare-brained marketing campaign for their new exhibition, vaguely themed around the idea of a square as society. And that's about it for two and a half hours, but Östlund's grip on the tiny details that make up human interaction is masterful, and the characterisations accordingly all have depth and subtlety.
It has been sold as satire, but the complacent vacuousness of the affluent culture vulture world feels scarily lifelike, and so the whole thing comes over more as a sneak peek behind the facade of how that sphere ticks, with all its hypocrisies. This is most evident in a protracted scene where a performance artist playing a gorilla assaults the guests at a grand dinner for the museum until they just snap. Meanwhile, the world of the homeless and socially excluded is constantly pressing in at the margins. It's hypnotic, daring, perceptive and maddeningly fluctuating in terms of tone and message, but never boring.

8/10