Elis­a­beth Moss is star­ring in Ruben Östlund’s first Eng­lish-lan­guage feature

Three years after win­ning a major award at the Cannes Film Fes­ti­val for his dark­ly com­ic fam­i­ly dra­ma Force Majeure, Ruben Östlund is back with his first Eng­lish-lan­guage film, which is expect­ed to pre­mière at this year’s fes­ti­val. In a recent inter­view with Vari­ety, the direc­tor teased a few details about his new fea­ture, The Square, which stars Dominic West and Eliz­a­beth Moss.

Inspired by Östlund’s own for­ay into the art world, the film will fol­low an Amer­i­can artist played by West, as he unveils an instal­la­tion called ​‘The Square’ at a rep­utable gallery. An adver­tis­ing firm is then hired to help mar­ket this piece, but they choose to cre­ate ​“a nasty PR stunt that is com­plete­ly oppo­site to ​‘The Square’ and its human­is­tic message.”

From the sounds of it, this will be anoth­er rich­ly satir­i­cal offer­ing from the Swedish direc­tor, as his fifth fea­ture promis­es to lam­poon the abstract, often pre­ten­tious nature of con­tem­po­rary art. The direc­tor explains: ​“I think the idea of art is get­ting lost on this the­o­ret­i­cal lev­el. Of course, I’m attack­ing that.”

But Östlund has tak­en care to empha­sise that the film’s scope will be much wider than insid­er mock­ery of the art world, reveal­ing: ​“I’m mak­ing fun of every­one. I’m very thor­ough in that way. No one escapes from this satir­ic approach”.

He has also can­did­ly revealed that both West and Moss were, ​“quite lost in the begin­ning” [of the shoot] and that it took them a while to adapt to his metic­u­lous and lengthy approach to film­mak­ing. And while The Square sig­nals Östlund’s intent to make films for a broad­er inter­na­tion­al audi­ence, he is appar­ent­ly deter­mined to keep work­ing in Swe­den where he can retain ​“con­trol” of his own projects.