Review: The Square

The Square, which won the Palme d'Or at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, is a social satire, by turns savage and meandering, that often feels like an expanded piece of performance art than a conventional film. Whilst one can admire and appreciate the film's lofty ambitions, there's a certain ponderous undercurrent that prevents Swedish writer-director Ruben Östlund's latest film from reaching its maximum potential. It enervates when it should gather momentum, but it's not without its merits.

Christian (Claes Bang) is the director of a contemporary art museum, whose current exhibition features an installation called "Mirrors and Piles of Gravel" which consist of about a dozen mounds of gravel accompanied by a neon sign reading "YOU HAVE NOTHING." Christian is particularly excited about the museum's next exhibition, "The Square," a conceptual piece described as "a sanctuary of trust and caring" where those within it "share equal rights and obligations." What may work in theory does not necessarily work in practice, and this is evident in most of what unfolds in the film.

Indeed, the theme manifests itself in several narrative strands, the first of which is the promotion of the piece itself. Christian believes in the strength of the artist's concept but, understanding that he's under pressure to make a big splash for the profitability of the museum, succumbs to his PR team's insistence that they create promotional material that could generate controversy on social media. Meanwhile, Christian is also embroiled in a side project, one involving tracking down the thieves who fleeced him of his wallet and cellphone by staging an elaborate ruse that had Christian believing he had saved a woman's life. Then there's American TV journalist Anne (Elisabeth Moss); their post-coital conversation includes arguing over who will dispose of his condom.

Their argument serves as an appetiser for two sequences that genuinely hone in on the social contracts that are hardly ever upheld. In one, a talk by a visiting artist (Dominic West) is continually interrupted by an audience member with Tourette's; he and the rest of the audience try to figure out how to behave in the situation, their unease quite palpable. Yet that is nothing compared to the show-stopping sequence that takes place during a black-tie party for the museum's benefactors, who are at first delighted and then paralysed into fear and discomfort by a shirtless performance artist (Terry Notary) impersonating a gorilla. The scene becomes increasingly both cringe-inducing and terrifying as the artist prowls about the guests, breaking down personal space and boundaries to the point where he drags a woman by the hair and nearly rapes her.

Unfortunately, those standout scenes feel few and far between. At nearly 150 minutes, The Square is too unwieldy and perhaps too bloated with its multitude of ideas to be as powerful and incisive as it intends.

The Square

Directed by: Ruben Östlund

Written by: Ruben Östlund

Starring: Claes Bang, Elisabeth Moss, Dominic West, Terry Notary, Christopher Læssø