From Omeleto.
A son leaves for the army.
IF YOU KNEW is used with permission from Christoffer Tambour and Viktor Wiberg. Learn more at https://imdb.com/title/tt26692092.
Robin is a young Finnish-Swedish man living in Sweden with his mother. But as a male citizen of Finland, Robin must leave his home and travel to Finland, where he is to report for national military service, which is required for all male citizens. He does not want to go, desperately searching for information on how to avoid it, even up to the hour of his departure.
Leaving his mother is difficult, refusing her gestures of help or sentimentality. But as he faces service in a land he does not call home and considers desperate action to avoid leaving, he must face the repressed emotions of his difficult childhood.
Directed by Christoffer Tambour and Viktor Wiberg and written by Filip Slotte, who also plays the lead role of Robin, his restrained yet compelling short drama is essentially a series of unravelings: a young man coming apart at the seams emotionally as he faces an unwanted change in situation and an unspooling of a tightly wound knot of past traumas. But the storytelling’s understatement steadfastly refuses the melodramatic, instead making for a poetic, intelligent viewing experience that rewards patience and attention.
Visually, the film is muted, naturalistic and somber, often shrouding its characters in beautiful but inscrutable shadows. The effect is not sinister or mysterious; instead, it’s as if they’re veiled, locked in their thoughts. It’s a fitting visual approach that matches the storytelling, which weaves in Robin’s preparations for leaving and the parting with his mother with memories of his unhappy childhood. We never quite see his father, but as a loud, cruel and violent voice, we still understand his impact on young Robin and his mother and how they made a life for themselves together.
As Robin reaches the point of no return, he takes drastic action to avoid service, later facing questioning. As Robin, actor Filip Slotte has played the young man as a tightly wound knot, containing his emotions under quiet fury and panic. But as he gets closer to leaving Sweden, his expressive eyes convey a growing storm of feelings: anger, sadness and fear. As he answers questions during his interrogation, he faces his most complicated memories, where great pain is intertwined with genuine love and immense heartbreak.
IF YOU KNEW is a spare, elegantly crafted film, one whose understatement comes up against a deep well of memory and feeling. With sparse dialogue and swaths of silence, it speaks to an emotional barrenness and a buried sorrow, the way that we hide difficult feelings and memories, even from ourselves. But when we face a drastic change or transition, it can shake them loose for us to reconstitute them and hopefully move forward a little lighter and freer, even towards doubt and uncertainty.
