Daybreak

Once, twice, three times the misery… Swedish writer-director Björn Runge lays the dysfunction on thick here with three unconnected and distinctly downbeat stories – each of them characterised by some good performances and a welcome dose of black humour. There’s Rickard (Jacob Eklund), the sacked surgeon who can’t bear to tell his wife that he’s lost his job and doesn’t have another – a situation made all the more miserable by the fact that his friend and dinner-party guest Mats (Leif Andrée) has won Rickard’s former job and anonymously bought his house. There’s Anita (Ann Petrén), an unhinged divorcée who takes both her ex-husband and his new girlfriend hostage and and threatens them with an electric cattle-prod. And there’s scruffy Anders (Magnus Krepper), a workaholic builder who is employed to brick up the windows of an ageing right-wing couple who have decided to close themselves off from a world they despise. Thankfully, Runge refrains from employing any clunky, colliding narratives (apart from one scene, literally at a crossroads). But he still can’t resist a fanfare of redemption at the film’s close.