Review: The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme mannen)

Dinner alone sucks...

Imagine steeping into a new town to start your new career and realizing there's no children, everything is clean and tidy, the food you eat taste bland and that you can't die. Heaven for some but for Andreas, the thought of that missing zest for life and unpredictability bothered him so much that he went on a quest to figure what was going on. With everyone being happy all the time, it sure will creep the hell out of me! Quirky and enigmatic, this Ikea-reflection of life is a comedic comment on social satire on what if life was on a monotone rhythm. One might decipher the whole situation as a dream which would totally be a cop-out or that he had died and gone to the neither-region between heaven and hell (which i though was the case during the opening scene) director Jens Lien had good intuition to leave it to the audience to figure it out, making the film a more flexible embargo of suspended imagination but light enough to flow though without thinking twice of its realism.

The only gripe that i though needed to address was how it was wrapped up. Rooting for the protagonist to solve the mystery, it ended abruptly, leaving us for another adventure to come. Or not...