Content notices for the film: Casual nudity, one scene featuring a racist assault, another scene recreating a nazi hanging, an off screen child sacrifice, one character shows up with slit wrists.

Just recently rewatched this film and it's definitely still my favourite satire of capitalist decay and malaise.

The whole thing is a series of vignettes leaning pretty heavily on the tragic side of tragicomedy, but there's still a decent amount of chuckling to be had.

The only successful business decision anyone makes in the film is insurance fraud, people turn to flagellating themselves on the street for the economy, all our chief economists and the aging literal nazi elite turn to crystal balls and human sacrifice to fix the economy, while the actual magicians can't even perform simple tricks to cheer people up anymore.

If there is a main character of the film it would be the small business tyrant who commits the aforementioned insurance fraud by burning down his shitty little furniture store and lying about how great his losses were, who spends the rest of the film wandering around whining about how poor and helpless he is to anyone who will listen, to the point where his unprecedented self pitying seems to invite actual biblical punishment onto him as a consequence.

I don't know if Roy Andersson the director is an actual Marxist or not, but the specific satire of our elite as senile old nazis who turn to petty occultism and superstition, rather than actual economic principles, alongside how he seems to take particular joy in mocking the small business owner as a parasite on all his personal and financial relationships, does seem to lean more that way than just generic leftism.

Overall I highly recommend this film, even if it is 70% bummer and 30% chuckle, though I do lament that a lot of the comedy for me is in the specific tones and language used in Swedish, so it might not translate that well.