Involuntary: Press reviews

'The vignettes of rule-breaking and social exclusion have a funny and stinging force: a mishap on a coach and a teacher sticking by her unpopular principles pay off especially well.'

'A delectably deadpan Swedish comedy'

'This film is the product of tough-love, arresting, unexpected and worth your time.'

'Unsettlingly insistent, smartly played and bleakly hilarious.'

'The whole is not exactly an advertisement for Sweden's tourist board but there's enough eccentric provocation to show us how the simplest things can seem complicated, and the most complicated often appear simple.'

'These minor cautionary tales of embarrassment and ostracism are, for the most part, predictable and undramatic, despite the microscope applied to them.'

'Conversation framed at odd angles is the dominant stylistic tic of Swede Ruben Ostlund's award-winning debut feature, a suite of quirky, semi-improvised vignettes on the theme of peer pressure.'

'It's a pawkily amusing attack on Swedish people's conformity and inclination towards reticence and respect for authority, at least when sober'

'The largely unknown cast convince, even if Östlund's detached visual style – with its off-kilter character-framing – sometimes frustrates.'

'The patterning of the movie is handled competently enough, but there is something programmatic here: despite the emphatic, heavy weather of realism that lowers over the movie, none of it seemed real, but rather a pageant of contrivances.'