After all, the concept of authenticity has been challenged in recent years in film and television. Many creators are tickled by the idea of spinning it to the audience by mixing alleged documentary images with clearly fictitious.
And sure, just feed on!
This little corner of the critics' corps, in principle, can't get enough of meta projects where storytellers merge into a dynamic dance of illusion and facts.
But it must still be served with a little finesse and thought. It is a pain to have to say that unfortunately this is missing from this enthusiast project, where the low budget is said to be scrapped by the creators themselves.
Mareld, who is described as a Blair witch in the archipelago, talks about recording a horror movie that goes awry. The fiction in the fiction is about five pretty unbearable people who go on lighthouse safaris and end up on an island where, according to legend, the gangster Maran ravages and scares people. Or is she possibly only in the mentally fragile Nina's brain?
A more real threat comes in the "documentary" part; an aggressive military type that wants to get the film team to leave the island as a military exercise is underway.
The mindset offers no new angles and springs, stays at a most basic statement that everything you see does not have to be true.
This has also been clarified in substantial plantings, for safety's sake repeated a few times, which warns that this is a movie that dribbles with the perception of reality. But the meta concept is fairly undisturbed, not least when the transitions between the different narrative levels are made so clear that we never have to think about where in the hierarchy of illusion we are.
Other events from the film's reality, such as the entire military trail and the end of it, are in turn a severe riot of screaming people and masked violent men. The chaos is total, the questions many and it is easy to suspect that the bearing information (backstory? The protagonists 'motives? The villains' ditto?) Is on the cutting room floor.
So yes, the team behind Mareld is reaching its goal, to confuse the audience - but hardly in the way they intended.
The intention to make Swedish horror is good and the filmmakers' commitment is contagious, but when you get into the feud about the limited biopsy of the Swedish people, you have to be able to attract more than that.