Your Company
 

A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence(En duva satt på en gren och funderade på tillvaron)

✭ ✭ ✭ ✭   Read critic reviews

Sweden, Germany, Norway · 2014
Rated PG-13 · 1h 40m
Director Roy Andersson
Starring Holger Andersson, Nisse Vestblom, Viktor Gyllenberg, Lotti Törnros
Genre Drama, Comedy

An absurdist, surrealistic and shocking pitch-black comedy, which moves freely from nightmare to fantasy to hilariously deadpan humour as it muses on man’s perpetual inhumanity to man.

Stream A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence

What are people saying?

What are critics saying?

80

Time Out by

Excruciatingly funny and streaked with coal-black humor.

80

Empire by David Hughes

If Chris Morris had grown up in Sweden watching Jacques Tati and Ingmar Bergman films, he might be making films like this. Based on Andersson’s mordantly funny observations about the human condition, the pigeon has it pretty good.

80

The Hollywood Reporter by Deborah Young

Though it abounds in the kind of sardonic humor intrinsic to life’s absurdities, the film is rarely laugh-out-loud funny. In a nutshell, quiet desperation prevails.

60

Total Film by James Mottram

One of the strangest films you’ll see this (or any) year, it unsettles, bores, elates and amuses in equal measure. Not for everyone, but there’s plenty to chew on.

75

Slant Magazine by Jesse Cataldo

It confirms the Roy Andersson universe as one of near-fossilized similitude, in which any effort or movement is disruptive, revealing new cracks in the set illusion of order.

100

Variety by Peter Debruge

The film is a master class in comic timing, employing pacing and repetition with the skill of a practiced concert pianist.

100

The Guardian by Xan Brooks

What a bold, beguiling and utterly unclassifiable director Andersson is. He thinks life is a comedy and feels it’s a tragedy, and is able to wrestle these conflicting impulses into a gorgeous, deadpan deadlock.

Users who liked this film also liked