The Affected
2020 · 14m · Norway
Directed by Rikke Gregersen
Tones: darkly comic, provocative, tense
Minutes before a flight departs, a passenger refuses to sit down to stop the deportation of a fellow traveler, forcing passengers and crew to confront their ethics.
Picked by Zoe
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Gregersen turns a boarding gate into a pressure cooker of Nordic social guilt — everyone knows what's right, no one moves.
Deportation-on-a-plane forces bystander reckoning — Renate Reinsve in the cast and the focus on paralysis over heroism is the right ethical choice. Force Majeure comp is justified.
Gregersen pulls a Force Majeure on the deportation drama, refusing the obvious POV and locking the camera on the bystanders' paralysis. Renate Reinsve's mere presence signals the precise register of Nordic ethical humiliation this aims for — and largely lands.