Mammoth

Sometimes it feels like Lukas Moodysson wants to punish us for our warm reaction to his early films, ‘Show Me Love’ and ‘Together’. ‘Lilya 4-Ever’ was a harrowing portrait of sex trafficking and child rape and ‘A Hole in the Heart’ an academic, all but unwatchable mash-up of home-porn and surgery. Where could he go next? In ‘Mammoth’, his first sort-of-mainstream, English-language film, he wraps a blunt, anti-globalisation message clunkily into a family drama that unravels between New York and South East Asia.

Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams play a young married couple and are limited by some terrible dialogue. As good NY liberals, they say please and thank you to their Philippine nanny (Marife Necesito), managing to remember the name of her kids in the Philippines. They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing is the implication, and it is the world’s poor who are paying the price. He is a gamer who flies to the Far East, where his website is being sold to a Thai conglomerate, and where his family’s story overlaps with their nanny’s. An interesting idea, but ‘Mammoth’s good intentions – like its characters’ – are lost somewhere in the delivery.