Force Majeure

A Swedish family is on a skiing holiday in the French Alps, enjoying bright weather and good slopes, when an avalanche breaks loose near the restaurant terrace where they are having lunch. The guests panic and scatter. Ebba calls out to her husband Tomas while trying to shield their children, but he runs off on his own. The snow stops short of the terrace and no one is hurt, yet the family comes away shaken, and Tomas's reaction becomes a source of tension between him and Ebba.

Ruben Östlund wrote and directed this 2014 drama, his follow-up to several earlier features and the film that came before The Square and Triangle of Sadness. Johannes Bah Kuhnke plays Tomas and Lisa Loven Kongsli plays Ebba, with Clara and Vincent Wettergren as the children and Kristofer Hivju and Fanni Metelius among the supporting cast. The production was a Danish, Norwegian, French and Swedish collaboration.

The film received a critics' rating of 8 out of 10 from 161 reviews. Audience scores are lower but still favourable, with 7.2 out of 10 on IMDb from around 73,000 votes and 6.8 out of 10 on TMDB from roughly 1,300 votes. It took about 4 million dollars at the worldwide box office, a modest figure for a film that travelled widely on the festival circuit and beyond.