Review and news hub for movies, music and video games

A trailer for contemporary Swedish arthouse director Lukas Moodysson's new film Mammoth has appeared over at Twitch (where, if you take a look at the comments section, it's apparently catching some heat). The trailer makes the film, which stars Gael Garcia Bernal and Michelle Williams, look like a pretty big departure from Moodysson's previous films.

Moodysson, whose previous two films were staunchly experimental, has the potential to capture an audience he never had before. Mammoth is his first film shot in English, it has two well-known stars, and it's also the biggest and most expensive film he's ever worked on, at $11 million (Lilja 4-ever was made for less than $350,000).

The film follows the lives of three characters: a rich businessman on a trip to Thailand, his doctor wife in the US, and their troubled Filipino nanny. "[Mammoth] has a very clear storyline, it's more accessible. It's a very big step, even though I don't know if it is a step forward or backward," he told Variety back in January. Considering his other films, "more accessible" is quite an understatement.

The first movie I saw of his was the teen love drama F--king Amal, the story of an awkward love affair between two high school girls, one popular and the other an outcast. The idea is a bit forced, but Moodysson's handling of their lives is phenomenal, capturing the modern teenager in an impressively naturalistic view. To this day, I still consider it the most realistic movie about high school I've ever seen; mostly because the dialogue between the kids are all terribly vapid, with limited vocabulary and full of repetition. It's pretty much deadening to listen to them, which of course makes the film somewhat of a chore, but also that much more fascinating.

The closest Moodysson's ever been to being popular (at least in the foreign arthouse circles) was with his 2002 human trafficking film Lilja 4-ever, which became a critical darling, nominated for numerous awards and became a spokesfilm for anti-human trafficking campaigns. The film was more sensationalistic than his previous ones, but there's still something admirable about it. After such an acclaim, Moodysson then decided to follow it with two experimental films—A Hole in My Heart and Container—that can only be described as deranged.

A Hole in My Heart chronicles the mundane and slothful lives of amateur (and unattractive) porn stars living together, deliberately packed with revolting images like a messy food orgy or close-ups of a vaginal cosmetic surgery. The idea is to deliver a harsh commentary on the porn industry, reversing the often glamorous rep of porn stars by way of disgusting images; so if you find yourself hating this film with every pore of your body, then it is somewhat of a success. Still, it's way too garish to watch, without much of a reward. I'm actually pretty amazed that I managed to watch that entire movie, something I cannot say about Container, a black-and-white abstract silent movie accompanied by Jena Malone whispering a narration that tells a completely different story and has nothing to do with the visuals. Moodysson and his producers never intended for these movies to gain a big following, especially in the case of A Hole in My Heart, which Moodysson tried to stop from being released on DVD because he didn't want any children to accidentally see the film (pretty responsible of him).

So Mammoth is a return to safer territories, obviously wanting to open itself up to spectators far greater in number than those two films. Moodysson, however, says he's not doing it just so he can appeal to more people.

"I do what I feel for. It would be hard for me to do the same thing over and over again. I want to challenge both myself and the audience."