Mark Reviews Movies: THE UNTHINKABLE

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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 6, 2021

The first feature film from the Swedish creative collective known as "Crazy Pictures," The Unthinkable is an inventive and intimate disaster story. The collective (made up of Victor Danell, Hannes Krantz, Rasmus Råsmark, Albin Pettersson, and Olle Tholén) worked on a shoestring budget—relative to the scope of the story here—of the equivalent of about $2 million. Watching the first act or so of this film, we might start to think that the filmmakers are going to go out of their way to avoid the actual on-screen action and chaos of their premise. That would be the wrong assumption.

Somehow, the team has pulled off something of a production miracle. They give us pretty complex and intense sequences, filled with lots of pyrotechnics and convincing visual effects, in a movie that sometimes looks as if the cast and crew would have been asked to bring their own lunches to save on costs. The story, which is grounded in the lives of assorted characters dealing with the repercussions of leaving and having been left, feels down-to-earth and personal. That makes it inherently more intriguing and involving than some of the big-budget disaster fluff that has been churned out with regularity by Hollywood. Even if this film's action ambitions eventually get in the way of the more human side of the story, the whole of it is impressive enough that we don't quite care.

The story begins with a lengthy prologue about a teenage boy, stuck in the middle of a difficult marriage and in love for the first—and, possibly, only—time. An aspiring musician, the teen just wants a guitar for Christmas. His father Björn (Jesper Barkelius) scolds the son for being spoiled, but he's really just hiding the fact that he has been constructing a guitar for the kid in the shed.

When the boy's mother (played by Ulrika Bäckström) buys her son a guitar anyway, Björn's angry outburst is the last straw for her. She leaves, and the boy, whose girlfriend moves from the country to Stockholm, decides to start a life of his own.

About 10 years later, the boy is now a man, a professional musician named Alex (Christoffer Nordenrot) who is just as stubborn as his old man. A series of attacks rock Stockholm, devastating important pieces of infrastructure and killing Alex's mom in one of the explosions.

He returns home, more interested in buying a piano from his childhood church than in his mother's funeral. When he arrives at the church, Alex is re-united with Anna (Lisa Henni), his teenage sweetheart, who returned to the town after her own mother Eva (Pia Halvorsen) became distracted by a government job. The two spend some time together, catching up on life, but Anna's revelation that she's married and has a daughter sends Alex running again.

Meanwhile, Björn works at a power facility in the area. For more than a decade, he has been convinced that Russia wants to interfere with Sweden's oil exports. People have labeled him a conspiracy theorist, but the recent attacks and the appearance of a strange man lingering outside the facility convince Björn that more terrible disasters might happen soon.

This is a lot of build-up to the inevitable, when Björn's paranoia and fears are confirmed by an outright assault on the power and telecommunications grids of the entire country, as well as by a more confounding threat that devastates people's memories. The screenplay, credited to the Crazy Pictures collective and Nordenrot, frontloads the tale with all of these interpersonal dramas, because there's no time to elaborate on them once the disasters and attacks really begin.

The process works for the most part, because we have a sense of these characters and their various flaws, as well as how their tendency to generally run away when things get tough prompts a bit more tension when things, well, get really, really tough. There is, admittedly, an abundance of convenience and contrivance in much of this—how everyone somehow ends up in the same town, just as the attack and its fallout unfold, and how Eva and Anna's husband Kim (Krister Kern) are right in the middle of, respectively, the government and military processes of the response. Most of these relationships are eventually treated as the source of melodrama, with a lot of arguing and a particularly forced payoff to the existence of Björn's handmade guitar.

The filmmakers, though, distract us from most of these shortcomings in the human drama by actually caring enough about it to make it matter (whether or not it actually "works"). They also do so by punctuating the story with a series of smart, effective, and sometimes terrifying action sequences.

Björn has to single-handedly confront a wave of armed militants through the open space and tunneled mazes of the power facility. In different parts of the country, both Alex and Eva have to avoid and escape cars driven by people who have mysteriously lost all sense of immediate awareness (The vehicular carnage of cars plowing into each other is pretty frightening). A group of people seeking shelter in a nearby bunker have to race against a crashing helicopter, and the climax, which goes a bit beyond any sense of realism, has the father and son finally standing up and fighting for the people they love.

All of the human stories become a bit clunky, and the payoffs to them, while theoretically haunting (Final moments of people lost in the memories of what could have been), aren't quite as impactful as the filmmakers clearly believe them to be. The Unthinkable, though, does care about personal in its depiction of nationwide devastation, and that's to be commended. The technical side of the film's accomplishments, pulled off with equal parts skill and gumption by the Crazy Pictures team, is even more admirable.

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