A Day and a Half [2023]

September 3, 2024

Helvete, if it isn’t another Swedish movie? And it’s starring none other than Fares Fares! You might remember him from Chernobyl or better yet neo-noir masterpiece The Nile Hilton Incident. A Day and a Half is a hostage situation thriller mixed with family drama and inspired by true events. We will be following Artan, an immigrant who, after a messy divorce, decides to kidnap his wife. Soon Lukas, an ordinary cop with his own set of problems will show up to resolve the situation. All of them will surprisingly end up in a car and that’s all I’m going to say about the plot of this movie. The script, on the other hand, could’ve been much better.

You can either watch this movie with indifference and be mildly entertained or do some heavy lifting to find thought-provoking concepts in this messy and rather superficial script. Fares Fares, who wrote and directed this movie, says that he read a short article about the incident back in 2008. To him, this seemed like a love story. So, we can safely say that apart from Artan bursting into a doctor’s office with a gun, the rest of the story did not happen. A Day and a Half is a somewhat lighthearted movie considering the plot. I mean, there will be some difficult and emotional moments.

We never venture into that “fucked up Nordic movie” territory. Since this is Fares’ directorial debut I think he wanted to keep things moving. The pacing is quite good and the running time is 90 minutes on the fucking dot. I also think that he was the only guy who could bring a story like this to the big screen. Mostly because he’s also not originally from Sweden but from Lebanon. The main character in this movie, Artan Kelmendi is from Albania. He has quite a simplistic and tribal worldview. It goes something like this: “I have child, I man, I get child, fuck the woman”. However, there are plenty of people in every country of the world who think like him.

His simplistic worldview was just a nice tool to dissect the dynamics within a problematic relationship. That tribal worldview assumes perfect conditions and clear answers for almost every situation. It does that to remove any type of thinking or progress from the equation. And our world is nothing but one mess spilling into the next one and so forth. Something that’s best exemplified by Artan’s wife’s story. And when you put the two of them together you get the realistic and very emotional story. I remember some lectures I watched about depression and how we all go through these cycles.

And how most of us pull through them but a small percentage of people remain stuck in them. And then the next cycle hits you pulling on other bad stuff. Before you know it, you’re neck-deep in trouble and you don’t see any way out. And don’t get me started on the parents and their role in all of this. The performances were excellent and I especially liked how Alexej Manvelov was able to convey that raw and almost innocent emotion of a broken man with no way out. Another aspect of this movie is the way the police handled this hostage situation.

I mean, just imagine if this happened in the US. No wonder Artan was so paranoid about the snipers. Finally, if you’re looking for more good Swedish movies I highly recommend you check out Force Majeure. This masterpiece also explores family dynamics but with a lot of black humor and thought-provoking concepts.