Redoubt (Värn)
Director – John Skoog – 2025 – Sweden – Cert. – 85m
***1/2
Convinced the enemy will attack soon, a man turns his small house into a fortress that can provide shelter for a small number of people – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 27th
Before this film came along, ‘redoubt’ was not a word in my vocabulary; it means a small, possibly temporary, building turned into a fortress in preparation for war. John Skoog’s stark film, shot in equally stark black and white by cinematographer Ita Zbroniec-Zajt (Woman on the Roof, Anna Jadowska, 2022) is about a man living in an isolated rural community who, perhaps influenced by old government pamphlets about preparing for war, images from which pepper the film’s opening moments, decides to fortify his house as a refuge for his neighbours in the local community should the unthinkable happen.
It bears similarity to the Biblical story of Noah who is instructed by God to build an ark prior to the forthcoming global flood. In that account, everyone else thinks him completely nuts and just lets him get on with it, and the same thing happens here – people like him, and he’s tolerated as the local eccentric. No-one takes what he’s doing seriously, in terms of there being any potential war on the horizon.
Karl (Denis Lavant from The Stranger, François Ozon, 2025; Night of the Kings, Philippe Lacôte, 2020; Holy Motors, Leos Carax, 2012) pours a mulch, presumably cement, onto a lattice of twigs and wire. He dismantles local railway lines and, with the help of others, lifts individual railway girders. An official allows him to take one, so he slowly, painfully fixes it onto a rig on his bicycle. In a dark interior, he runs test Morse code messages turning a torch on and off.
He calls in at the local garage to purloin assorted spare parts, but the owner is far from happy that Karl is taking stuff. In the end, he’s allowed to take three tyres, two of which which he carries round his neck and shoulders. Once home, he shreds them with a knife, and they produce foul, toxic black smoke in his burner. A child’s voice over equates the smoke with an eclipse in which the birds stopped singing. He pastes the resultant black goop onto stretched sheets on the ground.
There’s a certain fascination with watching Karl’s activities along the lines of, what exactly is he doing now? (as you try to work it out) or, what’s he going to do next? This element provides the film with some of its momentum. His comings and goings are to some extent echoed by the local children, with whom he plays ritual games such as Blind Man’s Buff. While he determinedly builds his fortress, the children are inspired to build one of their own in the forest, using twigs, bits of wood and anything else they can scavenge, a starting point much like Karl’s. Yet, for them, it’s a group pastime, in which they eventually lose interest.
Karl is obsessed with the idea that war is coming and building his fortress up before that day comes is a necessity; the children for the most part lack any such imperative. But not entirely so. Chillingly, when one of them states that war is coming, it seems that Karl’s perspective is gradually seeping into their heads.
A small group of older teenage boys not in Karl’s circle of children take it upon themselves to visit his fortress and trash it, but all they can do is ransack his outer barn; they can’t actually enter his redoubt.
Later, as Karl sleeps in his redoubt, intermittent flashes can be seen outside through the slits in his boarded up windows. Sirens wail in the distance, He puts on a pullover over his nightclothes and rummages through boxes of stuff – a head lamp, a bucket – before charging up the stairs to the next floor. He is running around frenetically if purposefully now, the equally frenetic camera following him. He mixes cement and begins to lay a wall of bricks inside his windows… The bombs are falling. Perhaps they only fall inside his head. Or perhaps they are falling for real. As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
When a woman’s car gets stuck in the snow, she heads to the redoubt for help. She wants a phone – he doesn’t have one, she’d have to go to his neighbour Märta for that. Instead, he talks about shelter, that the storm is coming, and tours her round hid pride and joy. You marvel at his self-sufficiency even as you’re appalled by his living in a fantasy world. At least he manages to offer his unexpected visitor coffee.
Karl is a strange character altogether; a prophet of doom to be simultaneously admired for his vision and sticking to his guns and to be pitied for his total self-delusion. Except, there is always the terrifying outside chance that he might not, in fact, be wrong.
Redoubt is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 27th.
Trailer: