My Thoughts on About Endlessness

Roy Andersson is back. After wrapping up his Living trilogy back in 2014 with the wonderful A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence, cinema's most singular surrealist has returned with About Endlessness, 78 minutes of his trademark philosophical comedy delivered in a series of shorts exploring the silliness, horror, tragedy and beauty of being a human being. About Endlessness is business as usual for the mischievous filmmaker, and it should go with saying that it won't make converts out of those who aren't already devout members of the church of Andersson, but it's a short, sharp shot of arthouse bliss, lacking a definite plot but packing plenty of gorgeously dry insights about the oddities of the everyday

The shorts explore the mundanities of existence; in many ways the title is the best indicator of what the film is about (endlessness, natch). Each one is rendered in Andersson's signature style: minimal camera movement, drab colour palette and a hyper-specific focus on the bizarre, but they're also playful, surprising and full of mischief, spryly bouncing along from one observation to the next with deadpan glee. Each short focuses on the vastness of existence, the emptiness of the void and what we choose to fill it with, and although stylistically the film is very much rooted in Andersson's classic tightness and austerity, there's a great amount of tonal fluidity in this film, which can pinball between a pitch-black depiction of an execution by firing squad to a spirited musical number with absolute ease. Andersson effortlessly flits between tones as he flicks through this gorgeously constructed picture book, but it's the images themselves that really resonate. The tableaux range from the blacker-than-black comedy wrung from a nightmarish crucifixion to the unfathomable beauty of a couple floating above a destroyed city, but even the seemingly minor images hold weight; my personal favourite being the hilariously unfortunate shot of a father tying his daughter's shoes in the midst of a monsoon, although special mention goes to the utterly unexpected appearance of one of the 20th century's most evil tyrants

The prevailing themes of About Endlessness are all classic Andersson, reducing the most bizarrely relatable moments of the human experience down to their most crucial elements, and the power of these vignettes echoes across the whole film. It is simultaneously powerful and ridiculous, but the greatest surprise is how it confronts the issue of faith. This is explicitly a film about the great forces of the universe and the extent to which we believe in them, but for all of his gleeful pranks, this is something that Andersson tackles with great contemplation. It's not so much that he knows when to laugh and when to stop laughing, but that he knows how to poke fun at the grander parts of the universe while still understanding their importance. Most importantly is that it isn't navel gazing nonsense: when he says something here, there is truth to it, and the final observation, in which one character openly remarks on the wonders of the universe, really does hit home even when it should feel preachy. The film very much sees Andersson work within his niche but again he proves why he carved it in the first place, showcasing just how well he's able to work out of it to deliver a true experience in the way that only he can

 How much of it works does of course depend on the person, but Andersson's sheer devotion to the offbeat is absolutely undeniable. It's early days yet, but it's fairly unlikely that About Endlessness will be usurped as the strangest film of 2020.

★ ★ ★ ★