Directed by Amanda Kernell
After a recent and difficult divorce, Alice hasn't seen her children in two months as she awaits a custody verdict. When her son calls her in the middle of the night, Alice takes action, abducting the children on an illicit charter trip to the Canary Islands.
包租, Nie tak miało być, צ'רטר, 차터, Το Ταξίδι, Чартер
USA Sundance Film Festival 
Sweden15 Göteborg Film Festival Sweden15 Stockholms feministiska filmfestival 
Greece Thessaloniki International Film Festival 
Germany Sweden11 GreeceΚ-12 
NetherlandsAL 
France France Germany Greece Netherlands Sweden USA 
In Charter Amanda Kernell delivers the most realistic and relatable depiction of that ugly, shameful anxiety that comes with trying to navigate the relationships within your family as it's falling apart. You’re a kid and you know your parents are in the wrong. They're doing things they should not be doing to you, but staying loyal to them is what comes naturally, even when you know that none of this is right. You know that this is not how it should be, and your parents know it too. Everything is so catastrophically going to shit and you're dreadfully aware of it. Your siblings are too, your parents are too, but talking about it will only make things worse. The anger…
Much of this is unpleasant and cringe-worthy. I'd decided that I didn't like this film because of the main character, Alice (Ane Dahl Torp ) who takes off with her children instead of waiting to see what would happen with a custody order. She comes across as unstable and I couldn’t find anything likeable about her. She breaks a lot of Divorce 101 rules, such as badmouthing her ex and asking young children to choose between their parents. I didn't want to sympathise with this protagonist, but I also didn’t want to judge her. The father’s perspective isn’t given so the audience has to piece the details of the scenario together from what other people say and how he interacts…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
You can laugh at this, but hear me out... Alice is bipolar(?)
Here are the red herrings throughout the movie:
1. A woman lost in a custody battle
This is very rare. Even for poor women.
2. You are the one who chooses to left us
Yeah the other part of Alice decides that
3. Elina's diary
It looks like her dad was the one being abusive to them. But it is actually in the last pages. And Elina kept doing fitness while she's being abducted. The weird thing is, Alice didn't stop her.
4. "They will live with Matthias, unless there's a new information regarding the kids"
The movie kept on showing us signs of abusive proofs. Such as…
From its opening minutes establishing the premise—a mother in the midst of a custody battle basically kidnapping her two children for a trip to Tenerife—there’s an unsettling mood to Charter. A paranoid kind of atmosphere, with Ane Dahl Torp as an unstable protagonist you just can’t help but latch onto. Kind of showing things from the perspective of the perpetrator, the film has you wrestling with the sympathies for a person with gigant issues. Never landing firmly on one side, Amanda Kernell brings a nuance to her drama, underscored by the mixture of the luxorious charter-setting and misery of a custody battle.
For such a complex moral narrative, I’m not convinced the film fully sticks the landing with a somewhat quick ending, but the wild mood and finely crafted storytelling up until that point makes Charter one of the more interesting films from Sweden in the past few years.
SIFF 2021: If you need me I'll be hiding in the karaoke scene because this was just brutal.
ZFF 2020 #22
Charter is a classic work by a director still finding their feet in the feature-length format. It's confidently staged and generally very well put together, but once you go beyond these surface-level merits, there's not that much there.
Yes, Ane Dahl Torp gives a good performance – so good, in fact, that she turns her exasperating character into quite an engaging presence – and I'd imagine this is not an inaccurate portrayal of a messy divorce.
However, Kernell also does that thing where characters' motivations and psychological states lack consistency and are rather haphazardly adapted to whatever a given scene is meant to illustrate, no matter the emotional arc. Plus, Charter revels in one of my foremost narrative pet peeves – mistaking vagueness for subtlety.
fourteenth and final sundance film!
really moving. i liked it more after hearing the director speak about it and her dedication to showing the nuance in these divorce and kidnapping situations.
Charter is the Swedish submission for the Best foreign film Oscar for 2021. Is it any good? Yes, it's a well-acted family rift drama about a mother losing her child custody case, whereupon she takes her two children on a charter trip to the Canary Islands. The father says she kidnapped them.
The only thing that's wrong with the film is that it seems very familiar. Does it tell us something we haven't seen so many times before? Well maybe - there's something about the mother - I suspect this is what the screenwriter was going for, but it's vague in the film. What has the mother done, why is everyone looking at her that way? Why does she have…
Den var långsam och den lämnade mig med alldeles för många frågor. Blev inte klokare när filmen slutade än vad jag var när den började.
Barn ska aldrig behöva välja mellan sina föräldrar. Så jävla elakt att kasta ut den frågan sådär☝️
Seen at Sundance 2020
A complex and emotional drama about a mother who’d do anything for her kids (and love). The cinematography blew me away, and the framing, composition, and lighting were consistently beautiful. I really enjoyed how complex the characters were; their motivations, actions, and how they dealt with the consequences of their actions was very well done. This is a very well made and well acted Swedish film that begs multiple interpretations and analyzation.
I don't know how to describe this bittersweet gut punch of a film without just saying you should go see it. It handles familiar topics in new ways, allows the characters and viewers to come to their own conclusions, and ultimately had me wondering about the decisions I make and how my flaws take part in them.
Had this sense of not presenting the story's full picture as a way of building a moral gray area through ambiguity and unanswered questions, but in doing so didn't have much of a point beyond exploring the difficulties of bonding with one's kids after a breakup, which had already been done to death.
Still quite effective when letting the actors' chemistry take center stage with an underlying air of anxiety.
