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In The Square (2017), Ruben Östlund crafts a force field where art, the body and power intertwine. The outcome isn’t a mere satire, but instead a disturbing cartography of biopolitics in contemporary life. The fictional installation that gives the film its name, a lit square on the ground declaring itself “a sanctuary of trust and caring”, is only the surface of a much deeper game: the administration of life, the aestheticisation of symbolic violence, and the depoliticisation of empathy.
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Management of bodies: control through affect and performance
The scene in which the artist Oleg (Terry Notary) impersonates as a gorilla during a gala dinner is one of the most brutal and emblematic in recent cinema. Oleg’s body, at once animalised and choreographed, clashes directly with the elite audience, laying bare the horror behind biopolitical performance: art that claims to liberate becomes a control weapon, while the onlookers, instead of resisting, become complicit in the humiliation.
Oleg embodies the disciplined and animalised body, the othered body, always vulnerable, always subject to normative gazes. Foucault’s concept of docility finds material form here: the performer continues until his staged animality becomes too real, threatening a white woman’s body, at which point the “game” is aborted, and the latent violence of civility reveals itself.
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Production of the subject: the liberal humanist as biopolitical product
Christian is the perfect model of the biopolitical subject: a man who believes he stands on the right side of history. His reaction to a minor robbery, distributing accusatory letters to a working-class housing block, shows how the security of the self is always constructed by projecting suspicion onto the “other” (preferably the outsider, the foreigner, the “alien”). The wrongly accused Arab boy becomes a symptom of necropolitics, operating beneath the surface of tolerant discourse.
The biopolitical subject is the one who does not recognise themselves as complicit in systems of oppression. Östlund portrays these mechanisms with surgical discomfort: Christian is never a traditional villain, but the very embodiment of soft power, the kind that excludes while pretending to include, that offers help while keeping his hands clean.
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Control through freedom: the square as a zone of exception
The titular installation proposes an idealised ethical space, but its symbolic failure is the heart of the film. It enacts a liberal discourse of inclusion without offering real mechanisms of transformation. It is an empty site of action, where the social contract is decorative rather than operative. Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” is fully at play here: the Square becomes a space where the law is suspended, and where bare life, life that can be abandoned without consequence, emerges.
The viral promotional video, depicting a child being blown up within the square, is the final farce: the image of care is commodified for shock value. Art, under the regime of spectacle, no longer emancipates. It imprisons instead.
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Biopolitical cinema: Östlund as a cartographer of control
Biopolitical cinema is not merely a denunciation of power over life. It stages its own complicity in these dynamics, through framing, sound, dead time and prolonged discomfort. The Square is one fine example. It offers no redemption, no escape, no catharsis. Instead, it maps commodified relationships, and ethics reduced to institutional slogans.
Östlund transforms contemporary art into a metaphor for Western culture itself: well-meaning, intoxicated with technology, and paralysed by its own vanity.
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By the end, Christian attempts to make amends, recording apologies, trying to reconnect with his daughters, but it all feels fragile, half-hearted, temporary. The Square remains, not as a sanctuary of trust, but as a mirror reflecting our political impotence.
The Square is biopolitical cinema because it interrogates the life we claim to defend, the art we claim to elevate, and the man we claim to be just. With clinical precision, it uncovers a hollow centre at the heart of Western idealism, infused with good intentions and convenient silences.
