Redoubt

In 1943 the Swedish state delivered a pamphlet to every household, Om kriget kommer — If War Comes: what to do, from the first air-raid siren to joining the resistance. Its images will not leave Karl-Göran Persson, a farm labourer in Skåne, alone. He begins encasing his own house in concrete and scrap metal — not building a shelter for himself, but for the whole village, in case the enemy comes. For years he collects metal and spends his pension on cement, and the house slowly puts on armour. Meanwhile the present and the destruction he imagines start to merge in his mind, and the building becomes an obsession. The war never arrives. The building remains.

The story is true, and it is personal to the director: John Skoog heard about it as a child, because Persson lived near his home village of Kvidinge. Locally he was spoken of as half saint, half madman — a man whose kindness and whose delusion came from the same source. And the pamphlet is not history: Sweden has sent it to every household five times since 1943, most recently — now titled Om krisen eller kriget kommer — in October 2024.

Skoog had already made a fifteen-minute film about it in 2014, under the same title; it won him the Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel. He returned to the material twelve years later. Nor does the film stand alone: it is part of a larger body of work about fear and care that also includes exhibitions, at the mumok in Vienna and at the Moderna Museet in Malmö, both under the title Värn. Skoog trained as a visual artist at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and won at CPH:DOX in Copenhagen with Ridge (Säsong) in 2019; this is his first fiction feature.

Denis Lavant plays Persson — Leos Carax's regular collaborator, the lead of Holy Motors and Mauvais Sang — which sounds startling for the role of a Swedish farmhand, and works for exactly that reason: Lavant's body and face tell you everything about a man working alone on something nobody else understands. The film was shot in black and white on real film stock. Ruben Östlund's production company is among the producers.

The world premiere was at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2025, with the Nordic premiere in the Nordic Competition at the Göteborg Film Festival, and a screening at Glasgow. It opened in Swedish cinemas in February 2026, and Skoog received the Bo Widerberg scholarship this year. Critics singled out the atmosphere and the beauty of the images, and several noted that the film is about an enterprise at once noble, hopeless and isolating — much like its protagonist.

→ The film on IMDb