EVIL
Director by: Mikael Hafstrom.
Produced by: Hans Lonnerheden & Ingemar Leijonberg.
Written by: Mikael Hafstom & Hans Gunnarsson, based on the novel by Jan Guillou.
Director of Photography: Peter Mokrosinski.
Music by: Francis Shaw.
Released by: Magnolia.
Country of Origin: Sweden. 113 min. Not Rated.
With: Andreas Wilson, Henrik Lundstrom, Gustaf Skarsgard, Linda Zilliacus, Jesper Salen, Filip Berg, Marie Richardson & Johan Rabeus.

The horrifically brutal scene of blood-letting violence in the beginning of Evil seizes the viewer’s attention at once and then holds it in place throughout the provocative chain of events which ensue. Erik Ponti (Andreas Wilson) seems a wayward reflection of the James Dean posters hanging in his room: he is indelibly handsome, with a coy inscrutability etched into his perfectly constructed face, and he is bad, horribly bad. His schoolmaster goes so far as to call him the epitome of evil, after the delinquent viciously battles a fellow schoolmate (whose bloodied face in the opening scene is only a gruesome foreshadowing of the acts of obscenities to come).

When Ponti is kicked out of his public school and registered into an expensive boarding school, far away from his disconcerted mother and abusive stepfather, he suddenly changes his manner. No longer is he the school bully but a quiet and obedient schoolboy and MVP of the school’s swim team – a sudden and somewhat improbable transformation. Ponti does not seem capable of such an abrupt and unwarranted conversion. Now sporting a clean and trim hair cut, he appears, both physically and behaviorally, like a new character altogether.

What Ponti actually becomes is victim rather than aggressor. Partly out of jealousy and tradition, the members of the school council insidiously impose undue harm unto Ponti. (In one scene, for example, a bucket of waste is dumped on Ponti in the middle of the night). However, Ponti will neither tolerate victimization, nor fully agree with his Gandi-loving roommate’s proposition of passive resistance. He fights back in his own way, blowing hot air into an ever-inflating balloon of hostility between himself and the president of the council, which cumulates in a dangerous encounter between the teenagers.

Though the Swedish film addresses the issue of “evil” as defined in a corrupt 1950s all-male boarding school, one might suggest that the film is too forward with the implications of its title. Certainly the entertaining and somewhat socially- and politically-conscious film does not offer easy resolutions, except that in the end, Ponti discovers the law of the state provides him protection from his school's administrative negligence – an entitlement which may be embraced only in certain parts of the world. Parisa Vaziri
March 10, 2006