You, the Living

According to the folks who study such things, Sweden is a perennial contender for the status of most depressed nation. So, it’s the perfect setting for a pre-apocalyptic comedy about isolation, alienation, and interdependence. Roy Andersson’s deadpan burlesque disdains old-school narrative conventions and character development in favor of a series of elegantly composed, tangentially linked tableaux. One may detect the faintest echoes of Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, leavened with a pinch of Eugène Ionesco and Jacques Tati. “The result is in some ways a comedy with a twist of the knife, and in other ways, a film like nobody else has ever made—except . . . Andersson” (Roger Ebert).