(courtesy IMDb)
Getting through life is hard enough without carrying along a metric ton of long buried pain and blame which neither you nor your family acknowledges but which comes along for the ride anyway but that is where Lisa (Karin Franz Körlof) finds herself in One Day This Will All Be Yours (En dag kommer allt det här bli ditt).
Or rather doesn’t find herself for a good long while in a Swedish film which appreciates with a healthy dose of humour and quirk (of the human and animated kind) and empathy, just how easily we can deceive ourselves in our often ceaseless quest to craft something normal and happy out of something extraordinarily sad and traumatic.
The film begins with cartoonist Lisa, who has a successful media gig writing for a newspaper with family-inspired one-panel cartoons, desperately trying to decide in a title for a forthcoming collection of her work.
By any metric, this is a big deal and yet she seems to be weirdly off-kilter and unenthusiastic about it, putting off calls from her publisher and on again-off again boyfriend Alex (Arvin Kananian), treating what should be an epically exciting moment of her life as if it is a nuisance, a blot to be covered up and disregarded.
Quite why she is so unhappy about impending success is left to our best guesses as she heads north to her family’s tree plantation which has been owned by her parents, dad and mum (Peter Haber and Suzanne Reuter respectively) for decades, the future of which is under discussion at a few days-long family get-together which also sees the return of her brother and sister (Emil Almén and Liv Mjönes respectively) to the ancestral home.
Lisa is reluctant to go, fearing not just the dysfunctional closeness of her family, whom she loves but within which there is a weird standoffishness that can’t quite be explained with parents who seems loving and supportive, but because she fears her parents need to chart the destiny of their holding after they’re gone means one of them is dying or something terrible in the offing.
These dark assumptions might seem like a premature rush to fearful judgement but as One Day This Will All Be Yours tells its intensely dark yet lightly funny story, it becomes clear why it is that Lisa fears what night come next but also why her present is being treated in such a hands-off and unsure manner.
Back home, Lisa is both comforted by the familiarity and repelled by it moving between tenderly close moments with her family and siblings and outright repudiation of their closeness which manifests in ways emotional and physical, the latter borne out in long runs through the forest in her lurid teenage running gear and an ancient portable music player which seems to elicit the need for Lisa to swearing like a sailor to the beat of some defiantly upbeat music.
What is driving all this and why do all the siblings seem reluctant to take over the holding?
Inspired by writer-director Andreas Öhman own experiences with his family, and there is a rich authenticity to the storytelling which feels emotionally close to the surface and lived-in, One Day This Will All Be Yours feels like a confessional waiting to burst forth even as the family, and Lisa in particular, do their best not to release whatever it is lurks beneath their often fractured attempts to play happy family.
Contrasting beautifully with the heavier moments of the film that dances between light and dark narrative elements with considered abandon, are the animatedly quirky moments that punctuate the film to an arrestingly amusing degree.
While the animated figures who appear to Lisa are fun in the their form – populating her idiosyncratic visions are talking bath bubbles, seafood and trees, some of which even launch into song – they often manifest to her in moments of real trauma or uncertainty, a clear sign her creative mind is wrestling with something far beyond the cleverly imaginative figures and situations she draws.
They provide some necessary leavening of much of the film’s thoughtful seriousness, casting what are deep thoughts and turbulent emotions into a light enough relief that Lisa, and we by extension, can possible grapple with what they represent and are trying to say.
Of course, Lisa being Lisa for much of the film, whatever message they are attempting to convey from the depths of her emotionally troubled subconscious, are dismissed until one point in the film when things come to a head and none of the quirky apparitions and dismissive routines in the world will delay Lisa from confronting a long-buried and desperately painful past.
It’s not entirely clear for much of the film what that might be but the presence of a young boy in football gear, played with winsome seriousness by Elvis Ral Lustig, suggests that something beyond cute animated manifestations is at work here.
What makes One Day This Will All Be Yours work so affectingly beautifully is that Öhman always keeps the story, even at its most emotionally intense, in a place that feels real and day-to-day in is feel and scope, reminding us that trauma, despite what Hollywood might think, doesn’t live in oversized melodramatic moments but rather lives and breathes in the everyday and must be carried onwards in those familially ordinary places too.
While the trauma-inciting incident might be dramatically sudden and graphically intense in the moment of upheaval it causes, its consequential impact is not, and One Day This Will All Be Yours captures this so movingly and with just the right of black humour that you can’t help but be drawn in and profoundly touched by it all.
Here are people, and one in particular doing their best to make life work in the present, and hopefully the future, despite their long-buried woundedness and who eventually find in One Day This Will All Be Yours‘ searingly emotional but envelopingly healing final act that maybe there is a road ahead that doesn’t involve hiding and loss but which might be charted instead by a family finally coming to terms with their trauma and loss, finally open to the richness of the good things that still lie within.