Swedish conceptual artist Anna Odell plays herself in this half-intriguing, half-annoying exercise in meta-narrative about conformity, performance and the self-absorption of its director-writer-star.
In the first part, Odell attends a 20-year school reunion where (shades of Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen) she shatters the phoney bonhomie of the occasion by making makes an angry speech about how she was bullied by everyone present back in high school. The studied quality of the dialogue and acting, and the multi-camera set-upsare obvious hints that it’s all fiction, but the style isn’t vastly different in the second part which is meant to be, a “documentary” tracking Odell as she shows “real” classmates the first half of the film and then confronts them about the past.
Ultimately, there’s something insightful about how scars in childhood shape us, but the gamesmanship of the construction coats the content in a gelid irony.
