One recent evening when my work was done and I was relaxing downstairs in my recliner for a bit, I decided to thumb through the catalog on Amazon Prime Video (the only streaming service I have), see if there was anything interesting.
Tabbing through the usual tripe, I suddenly came across this movie called The Unthinkable, and it caught my eye. Upon watching the trailer, I decided it looked interesting enough to give it a shot—even though it’s in Swedish, and not even dubbed, but with English subtitles.
Well, turns out I spent the full 2 hours glued to the screen…it was that good!
Here’s the synopsis from APV:
And from IMDb:
“Sweden faces a mysterious attack while Alex tries to reunite with his youth love, Anna.”
And Rotten Tomatoes:
“It’s midsummer and Sweden wakes up to a state of emergency. TV, internet, and telephone networks are down, and before anyone realizes what’s behind the collapse, a series of unexplained attacks take place around the country. Alex, a successful pianist whose controlled existence is upturned when his mother dies in a suspected terror attack, returns to his childhood village to arrange the funeral. There, he must reconcile with both his father and his old flame, Anna, who he has desperately been trying to forget. As old feelings come back to the surface, more mysterious attacks plunge Sweden into chaos and confusion. THE UNTHINKABLE is a disaster-thriller about time running out, and protecting what matters most.”
Now, I gotta admit, it starts with a young couple with musical aspirations and shitty parents (well, his father, anyway), with which I could totally relate, so I was immediately hooked. But the film progresses beyond that, and it was one of the better movies I’ve seen in a while.
The way it’s presented reminded me of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (the novel, not the movie; the novel was awesome, one of my all-time favorites, but the movie was lame, obviously the screenwriters didn’t understand why the novel won a Pulitzer). It’s post-apocalyptic, but the novel revolves around the relationship between the father and his young son trying to survive in the “Mad-Maxesque” aftermath, the world has been utterly destroyed and there are bands of survivors roaming around, many of them dangerous, and food is really scarce. Worse, the father is dying, and knows that he’s dying, but he doesn’t tell his boy, instead tries to teach him how to survive and how to think for himself and lets him practice making his own decisions, before he’s forced to do so later, unbeknownst to him. And one of my favorite aspects of the novel is that McCarthy never divulges what happened—nuclear holocaust, natural disaster, meteor impact, killer virus—we don’t know, but it doesn’t matter; that’s not what the story is about—and I really liked that approach.
Check out The Road at Lifeology Bookstore:
So The Unthinkable was set up this same way: we never learn what the “attack” is about or by who/what (though we get more clues as the story unfolds), it’s just horrific and catastrophic and these normal, everyday townsfolk are just desperately trying to survive, and in the meantime they’re attempting to reconcile with each other, once their priorities become clarified and realigned by the emergency at hand, and the high potential of not surviving it.
UPDATE: I’ve since learned that, like McCarthy’s novel, The Unthinkable was nominated for several film awards, and actually won quite a few—which, like The Road, I don’t find surprising.
Anyway, I enjoyed the film (an increasing rarity these days), and highly recommend it—especially to those who, like me, are constantly looking for something new and different, with a good storyline:
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