The Reunion (2013)

• Year: 2013
• Released: 15 Nov 2013
• Country: Sweden
• Adwords: 11 wins & 6 nominations
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2402091/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/the_reunion
• Metacritics:
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: Swedish
• MPA Rating: N/A
• Genre: Drama
• Runtime: 90 min
• Writer: Michael S. Kaufman, Anna Odell
• Director: Anna Odell
• Cast: Anna Odell, Anders Berg, David Nordström
• Keywords: woman director,

6.8/10

The Reunion Storyline

Anna Odell, a famous artist, doesn’t get an invitation to her class reunion. She then makes a film about what could have happened if she had gone to the reunion and confronted her former bullies. Later she shows the made-up filmed confrontation to her former classmates, and documents their reactions.—Will

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The Reunion Movie Reviews

A different perspective over the bullying issue

Unlike most bullying films, which tends to show the bullying itself, Återträffen focuses on the consequences of those actions in adulthood. The main character, Anna, is a successful famous artist who was bullied in school, as a child/teenager, for 9 years. The film is divided into 2 parts.

Part one starts with a reunion party, 20 years after school’s end. Anna uses this opportunity to say all that she didn’t have the strength and courage to say when a child. Despite Anna’s portrait being very well executed, the attention is easily deviated to the expressions of her former classmates. The hypocrisy shown by them is what one can expect, at least what I deeply expected. People just have a hard time admitting their mistakes, specially when those mistakes can tear one’s world apart. Even more when this one is a child, an innocent child.

Part two happens after the reunion, which didn’t happen like showed in part one. We discover it was nothing but an What-If. The truth is: Anna was never invited for the real reunion. What we saw was just a movie that she decided to make about it, about how she thought it would have been. She then starts contacting her former classmates and shows them, individually (or in small groups), her movie. Again, the expressions are incredible. This time, though, the excuses for why they did that are even more deranged. You can clearly see that deep down they know that what they did was wrong.

You may feel that the ending is somewhat inconclusive, since nothing big happens, but that’s just how things are, how the world works.

The soundtrack isn’t particularly perfect, but it suits the film pretty well and also have some memorable moments.

The acting is superb. From the bullied to the bullies. You can easily feel disgusted by how the bullies deal with the shocking truth. Just watch it for yourselves.

Maybe you were bullied or you were a bully. Maybe you were simply someone who stood there, watching someone being bullied. Or maybe you did something to stop it. The thing is, nearly all of us have seen, done or suffered from it, but not all may realize that it did happen. Because it is not comfortable, because it was wrong.

To me, this film was something entirely incredible. It is far from perfect, but as a whole, it is a rare 10/10.

Reunion hell

It’s a not so uncommon movie subject, this one about reunions which become life-changing drama. But Anna Odel’s version is shakening. She meets her old class after 20 years and gives a speech. It’s about hierarchies, power, games and one of the greatest sadist joys: Falsely making somebody believe you’re in love with her.

The first half of the film tells about the party, which is a humiliating disaster for Anna. In the second part, she confronts some persons from the class. What’s the greatest bully victory? Making someone feel she wasn’t bullied at all.

It’s not a perfect film, but one you will remember if you have any experience at all of hierarchies in school and other places.

The Reunion

I’ve had periods of feeling properly bullied, I’ve done things to people lower in the social hierarchy than myself that I really regret, but most of all I’ve been a silent bystander, and Anna Odell explores the guilt of all three parties, as well as the nature of memory and our tendency to dodge our responsibility, in an intense, confrontational and utterly depressing (yet surprisingly accessible) piece.

The first part, in which she stages a fictionalized version of the class reunion she was not invited to in real life (an approach that brings to mind her controversial art installation where she staged a psychosis in Stockholm), is pretty incredible in and of itself, but the second part where she confronts her classmates with the film shown in the first half really seals the deal.

After being uniformly hailed by critics the movie has suffered some backlash, and was even called a rape-and-revenge film by some, but I think the fact that Odell’s motives are questionable doesn’t make the film any worse, just more complex and interesting.