Astonishing, unforgettable, and perhaps no less than we should have expected from Johannes Nyholm, the mad genius behind that “baby trashes bar in Los Palmas” video you watched on YouTube a thousand times. Christian Andrén disappears inside his role (and behind a lot of superb makeup) as Rikard, a deformed and severely autistic man whose life commitment to the game of pétanque (like boules, but apparently way more aggressive) is a form of devotion to his institutionalized mother. Aided by an ecstatically original score and luminous fantasy sequences, this entry in the Panorama Contemporary World Cinema stream is both hilarious and heartbreaking, skirting bad taste and moments of too-broad humour, but in the end emerging clean—and deeply moving.

Georgia Straight, September 2016