‘All my films are about people trying to avoid losing face.’

At the crest of the current wave of Nordic cinema rides Ruben Östlund. Sweden’s ski-lodge documentarian-turned Palme d’Or hogger has built a reputation for taking a cinematic scalpel to modern society’s delusions of the self. It is a thematic throughline that permeates every frame in Östlund’s films, as well as those of his contemporaries in Nordic cinema.

It is specifically in the exploration of insecure, disenfranchised masculinity that Östlund excels. The men in Östlund’s films are subjected to toe-curling pressure and, more often than not, the cracks become fissures become a sundering of identity.

Explorations of masculinity on screen are nothing new, but Östlund’s approach is unique from, say, Martin Scorsese’s toxic macho adventures because they strip from their protagonists any sense of glamour or glory. Instead, Östlund takes viewers on journeys into the dark heart of vulnerability, cowardice, and emasculation, which lie at the core of how modern men are viewed and experience the world. They are sensitive and nuanced investigations that question masculinity but question, too, those who deride it based on ungenerous stereotypes and expectations.

This thematic preoccupation is most evident in 2014’s Palme d’Or winner Force Majeure. During a vacation in the French Alps, Tomas runs away during an (ultimately harmless) avalanche, leaving his wife Ebba to protect their two children. This incident calls into question Tomas’s manhood – his courage, his ability to protect his family, his strength in a time of ‘crisis’. While modern mores call on outdated stereotypes of men as protectors and providers to be swept away, society nonetheless maintains these expectations of men in dangerous scenarios.

That contradiction tears at Tomas throughout Force Majeure, as he recognises the effect his momentary, instinctive act of cowardice has on how Ebba and his children view him. Ebba is chilly, and when they meet with friends after the incident, she pointedly brings up Tomas’s spontaneous act of self-preservation, and his inability to admit to what she sees as his lack of regard for family in a moment of danger infuriates her and invites her contempt. Later, when Ebba breaks down in front of other friends, Tomas clams up – he is unable to express himself in response to her disappointment because to express would be to confess his weakness. He begins to unravel quite pathetically, until the denouement of the film, when Ebba gets lost in a snowstorm – deliberately or otherwise, we are left to guess – enabling him to re-assert some sense of bravado.

The Square, Östlund’s 2017 follow-up, is an art-world satire that puts unbelievable pressure on its male protagonist and watches as the cracks in his liberal persona spread to breaking point. It reveals in him a snobbish and self-interested tendency that wrestles with his need to be viewed as a tolerant and intellectual paragon of reformed liberality. In one scene, following a one-night stand with a young art critic played by Elisabeth Moss, Claes Bang’s Christian refuses to let her take a used condom to flush in the toilet – revealing a deep-seated and arrogant suspicion that she might be out to steal his manhood.

Triangle of Sadness, Östlund’s first primarily English-language film, nominated for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Director at the Oscars in 2022, again exposes the inability of the modern man to protect those around them when crisis strikes – this time in the event of a shipwreck that strands passengers of a luxury yacht on a desert island. Triangle of Sadness subverts gender roles throughout; the women become the providers and protectors, with men reduced to the role of jealous concubines. We watch as the men struggle to come to terms with the turning of the tables, and question what a man’s place might be in a world that erases what masculinity has come to mean without offering a new definition.

Östlund is not alone in exploring the question of modern masculinity. Thomas Vinterberg’s Another Round (2020), Thomas Daneskov’s Wild Men (2021) and Hlynur Pálmason’s A White, White Day (2019) orbit male characters struggling to identify who they are and how to assert themselves in the world. The effect is often humorous but always poignant, loaded with melancholy.

These studies in masculinity are pertinent for the nuance they lend to their characters. A critical eye and harsh judgements are laid upon the delusions and weaknesses of the male protagonists, but the films are loaded with empathy for the world of internal melancholy they each inhabit. It is an empathy that stems from a recognition that, while men – particularly middle-class, ostensibly liberal men – have made pains to adapt to the expectations of modern society, the adaptation is a shallow one, designed to ‘avoid losing face’, as Östlund puts it.

What can we learn from the success of these films? Östlund and his Nordic contemporaries are regular recipients at the world’s most well-regarded film festivals, such as Cannes. But in recent years, they have elbowed their way into the conversation at more mainstream ceremonies, such as the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes, and the BAFTAs, attracting rising and established acting talents such as Mads Mikkelsen, Woody Harrelson and Harris Dickinson. Force Majeure even has its own Hollywood remake already – though the less said about the execrable Will Ferrell vehicle Downhill, the better.

That Nordic directors and their thematic predilections are beginning to find broader recognition across the film world is testament to a thirst for honest yet compassionate studies of masculinity on screen. So much of contemporary discourse around male identity is uncharitable at best and gleefully hostile at worst. And that’s not to say that masculinity’s baser tendencies are not due a reckoning. But Östlund and his contemporaries are bringing observant honesty and faithful nuance to the conversation and shining a light on the contradictory effects of a changing society on men.