Family ski drama on how easily masculinity bruises while femininity is given less blatant but equally throbbing papercuts, restrictiveness of domestic gender roles and balancing family with the self. sometimes without enough grace, the pink and blue outfits may have been too on-the-nose, yet its portrayal is always accurate and each of the leads wholly convincing. and it nails how family arguments grow and arc outwards or down generations, how when you're really close to someone you can start to avoid letting them inside your head. the way the family worked, and the way the family worked rottenly on a vacation in particular, was eminently familiar to me. despite that it still made me really want to be on a ski trip with my family. That may be how Ostlund understands skiing so well. The mountain both alien and controlled, the intermittent thoughts of "oh, people die doing this stuff" while you treat it like a lark, the tranquil pioneering of skiing fresh show. I even wondered if he coached the actors on how exactly to ski, because the couple's technique says plenty about their personalities alone.
