Watch The Reunion For Free

Plenty to Like, Plenty to Dislike

hyped garbage

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It's not easy to understand why this movie has gotten the raving reviews that it has - not that it's a badly played/performed one - more that it's a movie without a real context/goal. Anna Odell directs and stars in a fictional movie that tells us how a class re-union of hers _might_ have become, if she'd gotten invited to it in the beginning! She isn't invited, and being bullied in school when she was a kid/teenager, this is her way of getting some late kind of revenge. Anna wants to show this movie to hear real former classmates to see their reactions. Their reactions is probably what you'd expect - some ppl just doesn't claim to recognize the picture that Anna has of her childhood, and those who do - doesn't really have anything to say to Anna that eases her pain/helps her understanding. Since the Movie doesn't really address the problems with bullies in schools, or gives some kind of understanding _why_ she couldn't have handled this pain of hers several years ago already, then the Movie kinda falls flat. If you're into Movies, then you'd probably can claim that it's artistic/groundbreaking and showing us something we haven't seen Before. For me, it's just a movie that shows a quite sad/disturbing side of Anna, we cannot really emphatize with her - cause she's behaving quite nonrational throughout the entire history. The Movie leads nowhere, gives no real answers to any question, and makes you wonder "what have I just seen, what was the point with it all" rather than giving you this "A-ha"-experience, that I suppose was her purpose of the film. If you're a cineast, you might like this movie still because of it's way of being 'different' - but if you're like me, like most ppl going to a movie - a regular joe that isn't a cineast, but someone that wants to get amused or getting something to think of - then you'd probably wonder why the heck this movie has gotten the good reviews that it has.

Unlike most bullying films, which tends to show the bullying itself, Återträffen focuses on the consequences of those actions in adulthood. The main character, Anna, is a successful famous artist who was bullied in school, as a child/teenager, for 9 years. The film is divided into 2 parts.Part one starts with a reunion party, 20 years after school's end. Anna uses this opportunity to say all that she didn't have the strength and courage to say when a child. Despite Anna's portrait being very well executed, the attention is easily deviated to the expressions of her former classmates. The hypocrisy shown by them is what one can expect, at least what I deeply expected. People just have a hard time admitting their mistakes, specially when those mistakes can tear one's world apart. Even more when this one is a child, an innocent child.Part two happens after the reunion, which didn't happen like showed in part one. We discover it was nothing but an What-If. The truth is: Anna was never invited for the real reunion. What we saw was just a movie that she decided to make about it, about how she thought it would have been. She then starts contacting her former classmates and shows them, individually (or in small groups), her movie. Again, the expressions are incredible. This time, though, the excuses for why they did that are even more deranged. You can clearly see that deep down they know that what they did was wrong.You may feel that the ending is somewhat inconclusive, since nothing big happens, but that's just how things are, how the world works.The soundtrack isn't particularly perfect, but it suits the film pretty well and also have some memorable moments.The acting is superb. From the bullied to the bullies. You can easily feel disgusted by how the bullies deal with the shocking truth. Just watch it for yourselves.Maybe you were bullied or you were a bully. Maybe you were simply someone who stood there, watching someone being bullied. Or maybe you did something to stop it. The thing is, nearly all of us have seen, done or suffered from it, but not all may realize that it did happen. Because it is not comfortable, because it was wrong.To me, this film was something entirely incredible. It is far from perfect, but as a whole, it is a rare 10/10.

Starting out, I liked this movie's beginnings, with a reunion from hell unfolding like a scene in a play, in the same vein of Thomas Vinterberg's "Festen". However, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that the directors aim is not to create drama or a slice of life drama-documentary, but rather an attempt of cold, dialectic dissection between the bully(s) and the bullied.The film only marginally succeeds at this, and the resolution is prehaps all too unsatisfying as a film seen in the cinema. It feels like a vanity project. The storytelling is self righteous and self-obsessed, the director being the main character of the film; she's surrounded by the 'actors' in her fake reimagination of a school reunion. Here her own performance isn't exactly giving us much to go on, and her backstory is only referred to sporadically, giving us little chance to sympathise. The other cast members play well enough, but they too, seem trapped by material that is too narrowly focused on analyzing, rather than showing the true consequences of bullying and abuse in institutions.Shame for a film with a good start to fail so miserably in its execution.

I've had periods of feeling properly bullied, I've done things to people lower in the social hierarchy than myself that I really regret, but most of all I've been a silent bystander, and Anna Odell explores the guilt of all three parties, as well as the nature of memory and our tendency to dodge our responsibility, in an intense, confrontational and utterly depressing (yet surprisingly accessible) piece.The first part, in which she stages a fictionalized version of the class reunion she was not invited to in real life (an approach that brings to mind her controversial art installation where she staged a psychosis in Stockholm), is pretty incredible in and of itself, but the second part where she confronts her classmates with the film shown in the first half really seals the deal.After being uniformly hailed by critics the movie has suffered some backlash, and was even called a rape-and-revenge film by some, but I think the fact that Odell's motives are questionable doesn't make the film any worse, just more complex and interesting.