You, the Living · reception & legacy

2007 · Roy Andersson

How You, the Living has been received, argued over, and remembered.

The arc

Premiered in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2007 to warm reviews and served as Sweden's Oscar submission; its stock has only risen since, as A Pigeon Sat on a Branch's 2014 Golden Lion retroactively canonised it as the middle panel of Andersson's 'Living Trilogy'.

What's debated

The perennial cinephile squabbles: which Living Trilogy entry is best (this one is often called the funniest and warmest), and whether Andersson's deadpan tableaux are profound or just the same exquisite joke told fifty times.

Its footprint

Its pasty-faced sad-sacks stranded in beige rooms have made 'like a Roy Andersson film' a shorthand for deadpan Scandinavian misery — a look endlessly imitated in commercials and parodied online; the title itself is lifted from Goethe.

Where it stands

A Letterboxd cult favourite and arthouse gateway drug — the trilogy entry fans most often press on newcomers with 'trust me, it's a comedy'.

★ Did you know? The film took roughly three years to shoot, with nearly every scene a single fixed-camera take staged on enormous sets built by hand at Andersson's own Studio 24 in Stockholm, largely cast with non-professional actors.

Named by the director

Influences Roy Andersson has publicly named — the director's own word, distinct from the inferred lines of influence.

Bicycle Thieves (1948) — Andersson has repeatedly named De Sica's film as the one that made him want to make movies, citing its compassion for ordinary people as the model for his own tableaux of everyday humanity.