A powerful drama, A Hole In My Heart is set in a depressing flat where a morbid teenager (Björn Almroth) watches his father (Thorsten Flinck) and friend (Goran Marjanovic) shoot a DIY porn film with a lonely girl (Sanna Bråding). Issues of morality, reality TV and friendship are explored in director Lukas Moodysson's most uncompromising film yet. It has elicited hatred from some critics, but Hole sends your brain whirring as well as your stomach churning - quite a feat.
Moodysson directed the charming commune comedy Together (which was a bigger hit than Titanic in his native Sweden), but audiences who watch this expecting anything similar will be in for a hell of a shock. Nor should anyone view it expecting titillation, for the film is mercilessly unsexy. Unless you find footage of a labia being reshaped in surgery erotic.
"A CHALLENGING, ENGROSSING FILM"
The style is as unsettling as the subject matter, with ear-piercing screeching, dizzying handheld camerawork and oppressive white-noise. Dread is a prevailing emotion when watching, with the threat of sexual violence never far away and a frantic, sexual food fight particularly upsetting. But for all the in-your-face effects, there is some thinking here: an attempt to explore boundaries and ask how far is too far. Is there anything we won't do in the quest to feel alive, to find meaning?
It is a challenging, engrossing film for those who can take it, asking uncomfortable questions about celebrity, voyeurism and the moral vacuum of 21st-century living. It could be a scream of rage; it may be a desperate prayer.
In Swedish with English subtitles.
A Hole In My Heart (Ett Hål I Mitt Hjärta) (2005)
