Force Majeure begins with a family photo. Tomas, Ebba, and their two children pose on a ski slope, a professional photographer arranging them into the picture of domestic contentment. The scene is mundane and slightly awkward in the way that forced family photos always are. It also establishes the film’s central preoccupation: the gap between the image a family projects and what actually holds that family together.
On the second day of their ski holiday in the French Alps, the family is eating lunch on an outdoor terrace when a controlled avalanche on the mountain above begins rolling toward them. It looks like it will stop. Then it doesn’t look like it will stop. In the moment of panic, Tomas grabs his phone and runs. Ebba grabs the children. The avalanche turns out to be harmless, a cloud of powder that envelops the terrace and dissipates. Everyone is fine. No one is hurt.
The marriage, however, is not fine. Ruben Ostlund spends the rest of the film examining what happens when a man’s instinct in a moment of crisis contradicts every story he’s told himself and his family about who he is.
The Avalanche That Keeps Falling
The genius of Force Majeure is that the inciting event is both trivial and catastrophic. Nothing happened. No one was in real danger. Tomas ran, but there was nothing to run from. And yet the fact that he ran, that his body chose self-preservation over his family in a split second, demolishes the foundation of his marriage. Ebba didn’t need him to be a hero. She needed him not to abandon her and their children, even for three seconds, even when the threat turned out to be illusory.
Ostlund films the aftermath with the precision of a social scientist running an experiment. Ebba begins mentioning the incident to other couples they meet at the resort, each retelling sharpening her accusation. Tomas first denies it happened as she describes it, then minimizes it, then claims not to remember clearly. The pattern is immediately recognizable to anyone who has watched someone refuse to acknowledge something they did. The comedy and the horror come from the same place: watching a man’s ego fight reality in real time.
Johannes Bah Kuhnke plays Tomas with a fragility that emerges gradually. In the early scenes, he’s confident, physical, a man who clearly enjoys his role as family patriarch. As Ebba’s challenges mount, Kuhnke shows the architecture of that confidence crumbling. A late scene in which Tomas finally breaks down is remarkable, simultaneously genuine in its emotion and performative in its display. Ostlund doesn’t let us trust even the breakdown as authentic.
Lisa Loven Kongsli’s Ebba is the more interesting character, and she knows it. Ebba’s persistence in raising the avalanche incident isn’t cruelty. It’s the response of someone who has discovered that the person she trusted most was not who she thought. Kongsli plays the role with a controlled fury that never tips into shrillness. Her calm makes Tomas’ defensive reactions look even worse.
The ski resort setting is used brilliantly. The white expanses, the forced leisure, the communal dining: all of it creates a pressure cooker where a married couple cannot escape each other or the social contexts that keep reflecting their dysfunction back at them. The hotel corridors, long and featureless, become spaces of mounting dread.
Kristoffer Bale and Fanni Metelius as a younger couple who befriend Tomas and Ebba function as a Greek chorus, their own relationship beginning to fracture as they witness the Tomas-Ebba conflict and start applying its questions to themselves.
Repetition and Slowness as Weapons
Ostlund’s deliberate pacing, which extends scenes well beyond their conventional breaking points, is both a strength and a test of endurance. He holds on uncomfortable silences, lets conversations circle back to the same point, and stages several scenes that replay the avalanche discussion from slightly different angles. This repetition mirrors the way the conflict actually operates in the marriage, the same fight happening over and over with slight variations. But it also means the film’s midsection can feel circular.
The film’s treatment of masculinity, while incisive, occasionally tips into a schematism that reduces its characters to positions in an argument. Tomas sometimes feels less like a fully realized person than a case study in fragile male identity. The film is smart enough to complicate this, particularly in its final scenes, but there are stretches where the thesis overwhelms the characters.
The children, while present throughout, are used more as props for the parental conflict than as characters. Their reactions to their parents’ unraveling, which could have added emotional depth, are largely peripheral. The film is interested in marriage and masculinity, not in the impact of parental dysfunction on children, which feels like a missed dimension.
The final sequence, involving a bus ride down a mountain road, introduces a new scenario that mirrors the avalanche in interesting ways but can feel like an epilogue to a film that had already reached its conclusion. Its comedic tone also sits uneasily with the more controlled register of everything that preceded it.
The Three-Second Test
Force Majeure’s most unsettling proposition is that a person’s character can be revealed in an instant, and that the revealed character might be incompatible with the life that person has built. Tomas didn’t choose to run. His body ran. But the film asks whether the distinction between conscious choice and instinct matters to the person left holding the children. The avalanche is a three-second test that Tomas didn’t know he was taking, and the results, once visible, cannot be unseen.
Should You Watch Force Majeure?
If you appreciate films that take a single, simple premise and mine it for every ounce of psychological and social insight, Force Majeure is exceptional. Ostlund’s control of tone and his ability to generate tension from conversation rather than action make this one of the most effective marriage films in recent memory. Skip it if deliberate pacing and repetitive structure test your patience, or if you prefer films that don’t make you examine your own relationships under uncomfortable light. This is a film that will start arguments.
The Verdict on Force Majeure
Force Majeure accomplishes something rare. It makes a minor event feel seismic and a domestic argument feel existential. Ostlund’s clinical eye, the exceptional performances from Kuhnke and Kongsli, and the inspired use of the ski resort setting combine into a film that is funny, devastating, and impossible to stop thinking about. It asks questions about courage, honesty, and the stories couples tell themselves that have no comfortable answers.