Force Majeure — Instinct, Illusion, and the Avalanche Within

Ruben Östlund's Force Majeure is the kind of film that lingers for months—perhaps years. Beneath its clean, almost minimal premise lies a torrent of questions about human nature, gender roles, and the fragile architecture of marriage. What does "duty" mean when instinct overrides thought? What happens to love when our primal need for survival surfaces? The movie uses humor, precision, and a cold visual beauty to explore these old questions with new cruelty.

At first, the story seems simple: a family vacationing in the French Alps. Then, during lunch, an avalanche rushes toward them. Tomas, the father, grabs his phone and flees; Ebba, the mother, stays behind with the children. The snow clears, no one is hurt, and yet everything has changed. What we're left with is the invisible wreckage—a moral avalanche.

Up until the famous bus scene, Force Majeure toys with the notion of traditional gender roles. Society tells men to protect, to provide, to act. Tomas's cowardice, then, becomes not just personal failure but existential heresy. The bus scene, however, turns the argument inside out: when danger strikes again, it's Ebba who runs, abandoning her family. Östlund's message is ruthless and clear—there are no gender roles in the face of instinct. There is only the animal urge to survive. Marriage, religion, and all the social scripts we cling to are just comforting illusions—a band-aid on the chaos of existence.

Ebba's friend serves as the film's intellectual irritant. She mocks monogamy, refuses to be defined by marriage or motherhood, and embodies the freedom Ebba both envies and fears. Each of her words widens the crack in Ebba's identity, forcing her to confront the dissonance between who she is and who she's told to be.

When the couple skis together as a family, both parents hold back for the children. But when Tomas later skis with his friend, liberated from responsibility, he reaches a euphoric high—"It doesn't get any better than this," he says, before collapsing into a scream on the mountaintop. That scream is the film's cruel joke: freedom without connection is emptiness, and connection without truth is torture. Neither side holds.

Ebba's solo ski is one of the most quietly devastating sequences in Östlund's cinema. Dressed up, alone in the gondola, she's met with indifference by the couple next to her—an echo of the cold universe the film inhabits. When she later spots her family from a distance while crouching to pee, she begins to cry. It's a raw, almost humiliating moment, as if her vulnerability finally reveals the ache beneath all her rationalizations: she misses them, misses the idea of being part of something, even if that something is built on lies.

By the final act, the family is back in the bathroom, performing domestic rituals—shaving, brushing, moisturizing—the choreography of perfection. Yet beneath this glossy surface lurks rot. The sequence mirrors the opening shots of ski-slope machines smoothing the snow: humanity's futile attempt to tame nature, to make the wild presentable. But nature, inner and outer, always returns. It arrives as avalanches, arguments, awkward silences, and unspoken griefs.

Force Majeure leaves us stranded somewhere between laughter and despair. It dismantles our illusions with surgical precision yet refuses to moralize. What remains is an image of the human animal—civilized only at the edges, alone even in company, terrified of the next inevitable slide.