About Endlessness

After every new Roy Andersson, we look forward to the next – and so far we haven't been disappointed. The distinctive style that makes every image created by this Swedish master stand out among thousands was created somewhere during the more than two decades between the financial flop of his second feature film Giliap (1975) and the artistic triumph of his third, Songs from the Second Floor (2000). Melancholy, empathetic vignettes that present the comic absurdity and fragility of hankering mankind and his corporeal existence in painterly, dimly lit, frequently spectacular studio settings with obsessive precision and framing.

The with good reason existentially titled About Endlessness follows this familiar procedure. Like a Scheherazade, we hear a voice-over telling us what she is seeing: a priest who has lost his faith; a rain-drenched father tying his daughter's shoelaces; a defeated army slogging through the cold.