In 2009, Swedish artist Anna Odell faked a suicide attempt as part of a project which earned her a fine, a public rebuke, and a fair amount of publicity. Her feature debut is less attention-grabbing. She plays an artist named Anna Odell, who recreates a school reunion at which she berates her former classmates for their bullying, and then attempts to show the finished (fictional) work to those who inspired it. What starts out as a Festen-lite exercise in public discomfort mutates into something more intriguingly deconstructive, although the layers of artifice ultimately prevent this from getting beneath the surface of its long-buried cruelties and rivalries.
