A Hole in My Heart (2005)

Synopsis: Filmed in secrecy with a small crew over seventeen days, Lukas Moodysson's fourth feature is set in a nightmarish apartment in suburban Sweden, where middle-aged Rickard (Thorsten Flinck), is making a porn film with his brutish friend, Geko (Goran Marjanovic), and a troubled young woman,... Filmed in secrecy with a small crew over seventeen days, Lukas Moodysson's fourth feature is set in a nightmarish apartment in suburban Sweden, where middle-aged Rickard (Thorsten Flinck), is making a porn film with his brutish friend, Geko (Goran Marjanovic), and a troubled young woman, Tess (Sanna Brading). Meanwhile, Rickard's sensitive teenage son, Eric (Bjorn Almroth), stays in his room, avoiding the increasingly disturbing proceedings by listening to loud industrial music and tending to his pet earthworms. Over the next few days, Rickard and his partners will take drugs, film their brutal couplings, and play dangerous power games, revealing their individual psychological wounds along the way. In sharp contrast to his lighthearted, tolerant earlier works, SHOW ME LOVE (1998) and TOGETHER (2001), Lukas Moodysson plumbs depths in HOLE IN MY HEART. This film will fail to disturb only the most unflappable moviegoer. With a series of disturbing close-ups, night-vision confessionals, and surgical footage--intercut with with bursts of earsplitting industrial noise--the result is undeniably confrontational. But beneath the ugly surface, the bravest and most open-minded moviegoers will see that Moodysson is making very valid statements about family, machismo, reality television, the mainstreaming of pornography that are in perfect synch with the humanism of his previous films. This film screened at the 2005 SXSW Film Festival in Austin, Texas. [More]