Taken as a whole, Ruben Östlund’s small body of work suggests that he might be a sadistic behavioural scientist with shame issues and a fondness for Jacques Tati. Yes, his movies are that unique, not to mention entertaining.

The Swedish filmmaker is probably best known at this point for a viral video he created with producer Erik Hemmendorff in which he breaks down after losing out on a best foreign feature Oscar nomination for 2014’s exquisite Force Majeure. He sobs off-screen while Hemmendorff calmly pleads with him to keep his clothes on, which is really just a very amusing goof on the themes—humiliation, social convention, the tension between our primal and our civilized selves—that characterize Östlund’s work.

"I think that something that I’ve always been interested in, and something that is very specific about being human, is the fear of losing face,” he says, calling the Straight from London. “And shame—shame is something that has a great impact on human beings. I loved Candid Camera when I was younger, and situations that are bringing out awkward behaviour from people.”

Force Majeure is the ultimate refinement of Östlund’s thematic interests, in which a single act of self-preservation—or cowardice, depending on your perspective—tears a perfectly appointed family to shreds. A midcareer retrospective at the Cinematheque gives us the opportunity to see how Östlund groped his way towards this hilariously excruciating masterpiece.

The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Östlund’s first feature-length act of provocation, is visibly “more influenced by Gummo than it is by the Swedish society”, although Involuntary (2008) could be the dry run for Force Majeure. This beautifully shot and acted portmanteau intertwines five stories in which people are undone by propriety, willingly in the case of an elderly patriarch who can’t admit that he’s been injured by a firework. It seems that Östlund frequently finds his stories in real life.

“I was at an ice hockey game in Gothenburg,” he recalls with a low chuckle, “and suddenly the puck goes out into the audience and it hits a man in the forehead, and he’s around 60 years old, and this guy, he just refuses to show any pain at all. It’s something about men at a certain age; they’ve never been the weaker part of the herd, but suddenly when they need help, they refuse to expose any weakness at all!”

Involuntary also defined Östlund’s taste for long takes, seemingly accidental compositions, and other oblique narrative strategies. “I wanted to unidentify the characters in some ways,” he says. “In Involuntary I think it created energy that not everything is visualized in the picture. What’s off-screen is activating the audience.”

With Play (2011), Östlund fine-tuned this arch aesthetic but sparked a national debate with the tale—again based on real life—of an African-Swedish gang running a long, weird con on two white kids and their Asian friend. “They said to me that they were very aware of how to use the stereotype of the black man in society to create an unspoken threat when they did those robberies,” explains Östlund, who interviewed the real-life participants, “and I thought it was so alarming that boys who are 12 years old already adapt to a stereotype that will make them do bad things.”

Östlund and his long-term producer Hemmendorff had already braced themselves for the accusations of racism that inevitably came their way. But Play is radically honest about not just the psychology of the gang members, but also the subtle pressures that cause their victims to consent. If Östlund really is a sadistic behavioural scientist, there’s still a strong element of humanism in his films—and a wicked sense of humour. As he told the Vancouver Film Critics Circle by video when it honoured Force Majeure earlier this year, his hope for the film was simple. “To increase the percentage of divorce in society,” he said, with an innocent smile. -

In Case of No Emergency: The Films of Ruben Östlund runs at the Cinematheque from March 12-21.