Redoubt

French actor Denis Lavant (Holy Motors) has a face filmmakers love. Creased and pockmarked, with a bulbous nose and prominent ears, it’s the sort of visage that’s compelling to watch do practically anything. It serves Swedish director John Skoog’s oddly mesmerising monochrome folk tale particularly well, considering it’s essentially 90 minutes of watching one man’s massive DIY home renovation project. Call it ‘This Old Fortress’.

Inspired by true events, it’s a story of fruitless obsession ​that Werner Herzog must be kicking himself for not discovering first. At the peak of the Cold War, Karl-Göran Persson, a farmhand in rural Sweden, dedicated his twilight years to transforming his modest cottage into a communal fallout shelter, or ‘redoubt.’ (In Swedish: ‘värn.’) Harvesting scrap metal, wood and whatever other junk he could get his hands on, then blowing his pension on concrete, he successfully constructed a fortification for a war that never came.

Persson’s single-minded devotion is reflected in the filmmaking. Spinning off from his own award-winning art installation, Skoog and his crew rebuilt the shelter from scratch, and much of the runtime is given to observing Lavant, as Persson, gather and lay the materials. He jerryrigs a system to haul a pair of weighty railroad ties on his bike. He nearly saws down his favourite shade tree all by himself. He walks home swaddled in old t​yres, begrudgingly donated by a nearby garage. In his brief moments of leisure, he jams on ​the accordion, leads his village’s New Years Eve countdown and plays with the local children, whom he inspires to build their own fort. At one point, Persson is harassed at home by a gang of teenagers, who break a window before scurrying off. That’s pretty much it for drama.

It’s essentially 90 minutes of one man’s massive DIY home renovation project

Yet Lavant holds your gaze. A gifted physical performer, there’s a hypnotic manner to his movement, even if all he’s doing is trudging across a field or preparing to suck an egg yolk directly from its shell. He works hurriedly, as if the bombs could start falling at any moment, an urgency that contradicts the film’s static long shots and languid pace. Skoog, a photographer and documentarian making his first narrative feature, shoots the movie in luminous black-and-white, giving it the visual quality of a Dorothea Lange photo from the Dust Bow​. Indeed, there’s a bit of Lennie from Of Mice and Men in Persson’s childlike demeanor.

What’s actually driving him, though, remains enigmatic. Is he paranoid? Delusional? A touch mad? Skoog never decides. But in the final scene, as Persson welcomes a stranded stranger into his citadel, Lavant lets a glimpse of anxious melancholy slip. ‘Time in here, the waiting, it locks me in place like a vi​ce. All I can do is wait,’ he says. Then, raising his voice: ‘I want it to end!’ You can build the thickest walls, it turns out, but the war will always find its way inside.

In UK and Ireland cinemas now.