What It Is
A Swedish dark comedy written and directed by Josephine Bornebusch, who also acts in it. Gustaf Skarsgård plays Filip, a man gathering a tight circle of old friends and family at a remote farm in northern Sweden for his 45th birthday dinner. A storm closes in, the roads go, the power flickers, and the group is stuck with each other. The ensemble is deep for a one-location piece: Aliette Opheim, Filip Berg, Jonas Karlsson, Johan Rheborg, Henrik Dorsin, Gizem Erdogan, Christopher Wagelin, and Bornebusch herself. It landed globally on October 15, 2026, after a short Swedish theatrical run.
In Its Favor
Skarsgård is the reason you press play. He does the quietly-cracking middle-aged host better than anyone currently working in Scandinavian film, and the first half-hour gives him a lot of wordless reaction shots to chew on. Bornebusch knows how to light a kitchen so it feels like a real kitchen, and she trusts her actors to let scenes breathe. Rheborg and Dorsin, both veterans of Swedish comedy, slot in as the kind of guests who make you tense up when they refill their wine. The sound design in the exteriors is good too, actual Nordic weather, not Hollywood wind machine.
What Doesn't Work
The setup is the setup you've seen before. Friends in a remote house, bad weather, buried resentments. Bornebusch's script telegraphs its reveals early, and once you clock the pattern, the dinner-table scenes start to feel scheduled. Some supporting characters get one trait and have to carry it the whole runtime. The tonal switch from comedy of manners to something harsher doesn't fully commit either way, so individual beats land but the shape of the thing feels soft. It's handsome, it's acted well, and it's never actively bad. It's also never surprising.
Who'll Love It, Who'll Bail
If you liked Force Majeure, the mid-period Thomas Vinterberg stuff, or anything in the "polite Scandinavians in a nice house slowly losing it" subgenre, this is comfortably in your lane. People who want their foreign-language picks to do something a Hollywood movie can't will shrug by the forty-minute mark. If subtitles already feel like homework to you, this isn't the one that'll convert you, there's not enough plot engine to pull you through the slower stretches.
The Bottom Line
BACKGROUND TV is the right call because the craft is real but the ambition isn't. Bornebusch and Skarsgård are both better than the material, and the movie keeps gesturing at a sharper version of itself that it won't quite become. Nothing here is preachy, nothing here is lecturing anybody about anything. It's just a competent ensemble piece hitting marks the genre set up a decade ago, with pacing that goes slack whenever the storm quiets down. Put it on while you fold laundry. You'll catch the good scenes, you'll miss the dull ones, and the ending will still make sense. That's the definition of the tier.