Holiday

[Eklöf] has the provocateur's gift for images that needle, nettle and stick, well before their message locks firmly into place.

For a directorial vision that wants to challenge what we do and don't see, Eklof also adds complications to trauma that make Holiday a searing character study.

Sascha is a complex character whose actions don't adhere to traditional story beats.

It's directly due to the dramatic somnolence of the first half that what comes after hits with such blunt force.

The film leaves the viewer feeling shaken, for the better, and announces Isabella Eklöf as a bold new voice in European cinema.

This is a dream world open only to the rich -- even Thomas owns a yacht -- and to most of those who glimpse it, it will remain distant. To stay there - to become one of its creatures - one has to break all the usual rules.

Eklöf lacks a human touch that should've lifted her impressive formal habits from merely cold precision.

Posing thorny questions that confront ideas of complicity and masochism... This one sticks with you.

Holiday succeeds as an unsympathetic, subversive spin on the rape-revenge genre, a film which offers no easy answers to its many probing objections.

Sascha is curious character; self-contained and self-obsessed but almost completely without self-determination. She is unformed and uninformed, guided by instinct, appetite and apathy rather than considered thought.