Film

Songs from the Second Floor (2000)

Director: Roy Andersson

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

For the first 20 minutes or so this slice of Nordic surrealism - a blend of millennial metaphorical allegory and bizarre black comedy - looks set to become some sort of hilarious masterpiece, before the novelty begins to wear off and the lack of a strong narrative thread takes its toll. That said, its very loosely connected vignettes - largely centred on elderly office, workers and their families coping with redundancy, inept magicians, bad hospitals and unending traffic jams - are visually striking, frequently fertile in their dark, deadpan inventiveness, and now and then truly evocative of apocalyptic insanity. A genuinely fascinating oddity, though its echoes of late Buñuel and Aki Kaurismäki provoke comparisons from which Andersson's film inevitably suffers.

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