Inland is a

state film, a wandering depression accompanied by dull melancholic music and a somewhat atmospheric image of a northern landscape.

A young woman, let's call her X, and her boyfriend are moving from Stockholm to the latter's childhood village in Norrbotten, but they end up already during the car journey up.

We never find out why, and above all not what it is that makes her still choose to stay in the village.

Which is odd but in itself completely in order.

Too little information is better than too much - but it is a thin line that separates the enigmatic from the bland.

X is thus a character

without a name, but that's not all she lacks, nor has she got any backstory, character or - what it seems - future.

A neutrum that only exists in cinematic now;

without visible driving force.

She rents a room and quickly gets a job as a cashier, and scenes from the grocery store are interspersed with sequences where she sits in her little rented crawl space and watches Midsummer Murder and eats sweets.

There will be many scenes with sweets.

Does it matter?

Well.

Or yes, the obvious, that she is low and seeks the comfort of sugar, but any psychological dimensions remain unexplored in Inland.

All people

carry a story, but Xs remains completely hidden from the viewer, at least for all of us who have not read Elin Willow's literary model from 2018. In the novel, there is probably an inner dialogue, or some other entrance to the closed psyche.

It is completely missing here, which means that the commitment slowly but surely fades away.

But then all of a sudden: fluffy splashes of blood in a sink.

It's a short clip, almost subliminal.

To trigger the mental forward movement, as a promise of future drama.


But attans ... it just turns out to be nosebleeds.

Slow is

often good, but then the meditative should be filled with some kind of internal tension, an underlying vibrating nerve.

Joachim Trier's acclaimed Oslo on July 31 appears in the memory, also a depiction of a depressed person's pain, but there are cracks in the character that let us look in;

events that evoke empathy instead of apathy.

Instead, this becomes a contemplation of nothing, a blunt film that overdoses on prozac to the point that all emotional highs and lows are leveled out, leaving a dramaturgical vacuum.


Thus in itself a congenial depiction of a depression, which makes Inland interesting, but only on a purely academic level.

Director and

screenwriter Jon Blåhed still knows what he's doing.

In interviews, he has said that the protagonist's reckless behavior will provoke in a society where forward movement is law.

It is an interesting thought that is right in time, but it is not X's condition that makes Inland a difficult challenge, it is the depiction of the same.

But one can not say otherwise that it is a brave debut.