Films

Joel is forced to return to his childhood home to care for his mother, Monika, who, after suffering a stroke, begins to show the first signs of dementia. The more time he spends with her, the more convinced Joel becomes that Monika did not return unscathed from her brief encounter with the angel of death. This fearless cinematic incursion confronts the fierce—and profoundly human—resistance to the changes brought by illness and aging. It explores the nursing home not as a place of permanence but as one of transition, where residents become entities that offer a glimpse into the inevitable decay of all things. With one foot in this world and the other in the next, Swedish filmmaker Mattias Johansson Skoglund crafts an unflinching gaze, charged with a chilling existentialism that, far removed from blood and gore, names the fear of death as the truest and most enduring bogeyman.