The Square · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the ape. A performer named Oleg dropping to his knuckles at a black-tie benefit, and the long ballroom of donors deciding, table by table, that this is still art. Terry Notary crawls the aisles on all fours, grunting, and for a while the guests play along — a little frightened, mostly delighted, sure that the frame around them (a benefit dinner, a cultural institution, people like us) will hold. Östlund holds the shot. That is the whole method: he holds the shot until holding it becomes unbearable, until the room has to decide whether the performance is over, and no one will be the one to say so.

Deleuze has a name for what that scene turns the body into. He calls it the gest — a posture that stops being private behavior and becomes the visible shape of a social relation. Notary's animal is not a character with an inner life; he is a test rig. Every twitch of his back exposes the contract the room is standing on: the agreement to call this culture, the agreement not to intervene, the calculation of who moves first. When he finally seizes a woman and the men rise as one to beat him down, we are not watching an action so much as watching a relation become legible. Östlund's cinema is, in Deleuze's terms, a cinema of the body — it reads the everyday and the ceremonial body as the place where social pressure is stored, and it films that body from a fixed distance so we can study it.

Which is why almost nothing in the film gets resolved by anyone doing anything. This is the deeper point, and worth saying plainly, because it is easy to mistake The Square for a plot. In the classical movie — Deleuze's movement-image — a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; the action closes the gap. Östlund's Christian can perceive beautifully. He is a curator; perception is his profession. What he cannot do is act adequately on anything he sees. His phone is stolen, and his response — photocopying a threatening letter and shoving it under every door of a poor apartment block — solves nothing and wrongs an innocent boy who then haunts the edges of the film demanding an apology Christian can barely form. Deleuze calls this the crisis of the action-image: the circuit of situation into action into new situation has gone slack. The character sees, and stalls.

The film makes the stall structural rather than personal. Its scenes are discrete set-pieces, weakly linked — a press conference, a convenience store, a stairwell confrontation, a used condom negotiated over like a hostage — and the causal thread between them keeps thinning to a filament. Deleuze's term is the dispersive situation with weak links: many strands, slackened causality, a plot that never gathers into a single act. What holds it together is not story but the recurring shape of failure. And the durations Östlund refuses to cut — the extra beats after the joke has died, the scene that will not release you — are what Deleuze calls dead time, temps mort: stretches where nothing advances, where you simply endure the situation as the people onscreen endure it.

That endurance is the film's real subject, and it is aimed at us. By withholding close-ups and holding on wide, locked-off masters, Wenzel's camera puts you in the position of the seer — Deleuze's voyant, the one who can only watch and listen because no action is available. You scan the frame for the source of the unease. You become, precisely, one more diner at the gala who will not stand up. The crowd itself Östlund films as what Deleuze calls a dividual: not a collection of individuals but a single affective mass whose mood migrates — delight, then paralysis, then violence — as one body. The horror is that the mass includes you.

And the Square? The bordered zone painted on the museum forecourt, billed as 'a sanctuary of trust and caring,' is the film's discourse-image — an image that poses a problem it cannot solve and knows it. It is an artwork about the social contract installed by people who cannot honor the contract for the length of a working day. The whole art world here moves in what Deleuze calls a consciousness of clichés: everyone can quote the humane idea, no one can inhabit it, and the film is savage precisely because its targets are fluent. The Square is the symbol in the strict sense — the single object that condenses the film's organizing relation: the gap between the value professed and the body's actual conduct when tested.

Östlund did not invent this laboratory. He built it out of Buñuel — the trapped guests of The Exterminating Angel, the interrupted dinners of The Discreet Charm — and out of Haneke's Caché, the clinical long take trained on a cultured man whose buried failure surfaces. His own earlier films, Play and Force Majeure, are where the method hardened: the real-world social experiment shot in distant static masters, the single act of cowardice held until it curdles. What The Square adds is scale and nerve — the willingness to let a man impersonate an ape at the center of a gala and let the camera, and you, sit in it. That is the invention: discomfort raised to a form of thought, the held shot as an instrument for making a social relation stand still long enough to be read. Watch it again and watch your own impulse to look away. Deleuze would tell you that flinch is the film thinking through you.