Anders T. Andersen, Birgitte Larsen, Ellen Horn

Forty-year-old Andreas arrives in a strange city with no memory of how he got there. He is presented with a job, an apartment--even a wife. As he explores his new surroundings, Andreas realizes he has...( read more  read more... ) arrived in his after-life and must escape.

Flixster Users

82% liked it

4,529 ratings

Critics

71% liked it

21 critics

Unrated, 1 hr. 35 min.

Directed by: Jens Lien

Release Date: February 10, 2007

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DVD Release Date: January 8, 2008

Stats: 426 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (426)


  • June 2, 2008
    This film depicts what I think we will have to face when we pass on, plain and simple boredom. forceful, twisted, bleak, funny and discouraging surrealism.
  • April 17, 2008
    Beautifully constructed meditation on the point of living and how being immortal might effect it. Clinical cinematography and dry black humour add to the surreal atmosphere. The ending was a bit of a let down though.
  • October 23, 2007
    A very wry look at a purgatory of sheer bland.
  • November 20, 2009
    (may contained spoiler)
    what a brilliant satire-comedic, eerie yet delightful fantasy, i think this is the kind of film which could be interpreted differently by different people.,
    mine is, from only the surface this film is quite acceptable by offering a nice and eerie fantasy f...( read more)ilm that will left you strange feeling, but if we care enough to re-think about this movie, we could see this movie is trying to capture the life in hell, so for me jens lien is trying to showed us his vision about hell in this movie, and in my opinion he did one HELL of a job..
  • November 7, 2009
    Camera using great.But i think a movie must say something.Ok,"Bothersome Man" is really saying something.It critize the machine people.I mean the people which only talks about and do the same thing.For example Andreas's first girlfriend always talking about furnitures and decorat...( read more)ion of his home.Thats annoying.And when Andreas wants to escape society exclude him.So Jens Lien wants to critizes this machine people.But doing this with a disguised language.He could say this with a more clear language.So what i want to say is:Movie could be less symbolic and clear.For example i didnt know Andreas has gone to after-life before i read the plot.I would love the movie if it was less symbolic.But i liked it anyway.
  • August 7, 2009
    Atmospheric, darkly funny, different.
  • July 28, 2009
    wow umn just seen this movie 4 the 1st time n think that this is a good movie 2 watch...its got a good cast of actors/actressess thorughout this movie.....i think that anders t andersen, birgitte larsen, ellen horn, johannes joner, ivar lykke, hanne lindb?k, per schaaning, petron...( read more)ella barker, sigve B?e play good roles/parts throughout this movie.....i think that the director of this black - comedy/drama/thriller movie had done a great job of directing this movie because you never know what 2 expect throughout this movie its a really strange/bizarre movie but its a brilliant movie 2 watch n its enjoyable 2 watch
  • July 26, 2009
    "The Bothersome Man" is an unusual but not particularly rich or complex film, so much so that I feel that if I say anything about it, I will have said everything there is to say. To be honest, it is so slow that I watched it on x2 fast forward, which actually only made it one thi...( read more)rd shorter, and no harder to follow, because it is in icelandic and there is so little dialogue that you still have the time to read the subtitles. My main criticism of the film, anyway, is that it should have been a twenty-minute short at most (and I didn't think "The Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford" or Longuine's "The Island" were one second too long.)

    The film tells the story of a man who throws himself under a train and is brought to a city where he discovers that nothing he eats or drinks has any taste, everybody has completely flat affect, you can't have a meaningful conversation with anyone and nobody really cares about anyone, although they're always smiling and doing what everybody else wants them to do, like so many Stepford wives and husbands. The only subject anyone seems to be vaguely excited about is interior decoration, with a common preference for the minimalistic, the modernistic and the clinical, and nothing but shades of grey on the walls. All the rest is, at best, "very nice."

    I don't know whether this film is actually intended as a meditation on Hell or as a commentary on our world as seen by a nonconformist who finds everyone and everything in our modern consumer society dull and bland. If the latter, there is not much in the film that has not been said before, particularly in Jacques Tati's "Play Time", which was about the switch to exactly that kind of world, and how it swallowed the warm, human-friendly environment that preceded it.

    But the film did manage to hit me very personally because I feel I have married a woman whose inner life is perfectly mirrored in the world it describes, a woman who doesn't listen to music, has never opened a graphic novel in her life, never plays games, reads about a book a year out of duty, doesn't care much about movies, sleeps through most of them and usually forgets them within a couple of months, entertains people whom she does not consider friends, will never touch an animal or let one enter her house (there are absolutely no animals in the film), keeps everything squeaky clean, only uses the Internet for work, is bored with pretty much everything she does and really only cares about getting her work done, which takes roughly all her waking hours. The only difference I can think of is that even though she feels her real vocation was for interior decoration, her tastes are for more classical styles.

    So the hero's attempt to dig a hole out of this dystopian nightmare felt for me like a metaphor of my own personal life, and my efforts to connect to something like another living soul, either through books, films, the Internet, animals or imaginary friendships.

    This is my way of saying that outlandish as its premise may seem to be, "The Bothersome Man" is not devoid of psychological relevance, and may have something to say about the way you feel inside and relate to the people around you and the world they are building.

    (In addition to being psychologically disturbing, the film has at least three intense gore scenes, including a man cutting his own finger off and bleeding profusely; a man impaled on a fence and losing his bowels on the pavement; and a man being run over repeatedly by subway trains.)
  • July 26, 2009
    If you like odd movies with odd endings you will love The Bothersome Man.
  • December 31, 2008
    An excellent film, where the main character is stuck in an environment where nobody shows any creativity or feeling, and has no apparent means of escape. Even all of his suicide attempts provide no exit from his purgatory-like existence. A disturbingly familiar dark comedy.

Critic Reviews


September 20, 2007
Colin Covert, The Minneapolis Star Tribune

This is a bizarre social satire that mixes the mild-mannered humor of Jacques Tati with stunningly gory slapstick. full review

View more The Bothersome Man (Den Brysomme mannen) reviews at RottenTomatoes.com

Comments


  • courtnyyankees
    June 19, 2007
    Does anyone get what happened in the end of this movie? Why did he end up in a blizzardy town?

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