Patrik, Age 1.5

Gay couple Gran (Skarsgrd) and Sven (Petersson) think they’re adopting a year-and-a-half-old kid. But a misplaced piece of punctuation on the adoption letter obscures the truth: Patrik (Ljungman) is actually 15, troubled and—oh, the irony—a rabid homophobe. How Gran and his new charge bond (party boy Sven quickly splits) is the stuff of time-tested trite melodrama, yet Ella Lemhagen’s film is saved from total feel-good irrelevance thanks to its consideration of the complex tensions between a rigid society—represented by a candy-colored, hyperreal suburbia—and its least “conventional” members.—Andrew Schenker

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