88
Slant Magazine by Abhimanyu Das
It comes down on the essential hollowness of traditional gender roles like the avalanche that proves to be its inciting event.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
80
The Hollywood Reporter by Boyd van Hoeij
This is another solid and provocative feature from Ostlund.
90
Force Majeure represents what is perhaps Östlund's most sophisticated thought experiment yet, at once provocative and wise. It is a penetrating study of that most ludicrous of social pretenses — masculinity, toxic and ubiquitous.
91
Force Majeure is an impressive and adult piece of work, bracing and intelligent.
91
Force Majeure is a brutally smart and original film.
80
The film builds riotously via a series of verbal takedowns as male authority goes limp in the wake of a regrettable impulse. This is slender material to build a whole film around, but Östlund turns it into something deep, for viewers with patience.
90
Visually stunning even in its most banal moments and emotionally perceptive almost to a fault.
75
McClatchy-Tribune News Service by Roger Moore
Chilling, cruel and funny — in an icy, Swedish way.
90
Östland writes the conflict between husband and wife beautifully, like a scab that gets picked at until it bleeds, and he does things cinematically, too, to suggest the growing distance between them—an already-cool visual palette broadens like a yawning chasm.
80
Mightily clever in its rather theatrical structure, but bracingly cinematic in its formal approach, the movie has a bold, ambiguous final act.