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Holiday begins with young Sascha (Victoria Carmen Sonne) arriving at the Turkish Riviera, being picked up by Bobby (Yuval Segal), on behalf of her new beau, drug lord Michael (Lai Yde), and does herself no favours when she helps herself to some of his dodgy money.
However, while she’s seeing him, she also has a chance meeting with a couple of guys in an ice cream parlour and takes a shine to one of them, Thomas (Thijs Römer).
Thus sets the scene for a potential myriad of complications between the three of them, yet even in the brief 92-minute running time, there’s lots of ‘weird for the sake of being weird’ in this arthouse flick, and so many scenes where absolutely nothing of consequence is happening. And then add in some ridiculous, impuslive violence. This is a shame as writer/director Isabella Eklöf was one of the three writers of the bizarre Border, and I enjoyed that.
On a technical note, it’s rather odd that the black bars are a bit grey rather than black, and this shows when the opening credits are played out with a black background.
Before I saw this, I knew it this film was known for being contraversial due to a particular scene, but for which I didn’t know the contents, so I’ll describe it behind a spoiler header if you don’t want to know what it is prior to watching it.
If you enjoyed the film, then it has a great picture, as you’d expect from a modern movie – albeit no huge task for your speakers as it’s basically a dialogue piece – but there’s also a few extras worth checking out:
- Isabella Eklöf: On Holiday (19:43): An interview with the female director and co-writer, who speaks in English, talking about the film and how it was based on a book called Louis Liv, not scene-for-scene, but in that this film started with that premise as a jumping-off point. This extra has two chapters.
Note that there are no subtitles on the extras.
- Q&A with Isabella Eklöf (28:47): An extensive Q&A conducted by Lizzie Francke at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, on August 6th 2019, including questions from the audience, one being about *that scene* which I mentioned in the spoiler header above. This extra has three chapters.
- Deleted scene (3:01): An extension to an early scene where, here, not a lot happens, as Sascha is chatted up by some Swedish men before Michael arrives.
- Theatrical Trailer (1:51): In the original 2.35:1 widescreen aspect ratio.
- Willy Kyrklund (10:32): A short documentary by Isabella Eklöf from 2002, about Finnish Swedish-speaking author Willy Kyrklund. No, me neither.
The main menu is static and silent, with a shot of the lead actress. There are less than the average number of chapters with 10, and subtitles are in English only.
Holiday is released today on Blu-ray.
Cert: 
Running time: 92 minutes
Year: 2018
Distributor: Anti-Worlds Releasing
Cat.no: AWBD002R0
Released: February 24th 2020
Chapters: 10
Picture: 1080p High Definition
Sound: Dolby Digital 5.1
Languages: English
Subtitles: English SDH
Widescreen: 2.35:1
Disc Format: BD50
|
FILM CONTENT PICTURE QUALITY SOUND QUALITY EXTRAS |
2 10 7 3 |
| OVERALL | 5.5 |
Director: Isabella Eklöf
Producer: David B Sørensen
Screenplay: Johanne Algren, Isabella Eklöf
Music: Martin Dirkov
Cast:
Sascha: Victoria Carmen Sonne
Michael: Lai Yde
Thomas: Thijs Römer
Bobby: Yuval Segal
Bo: Bo Brønnum
Musse: Adam Ild Rohweder
Jens: Morten Hemmingsen
Maria: Mill Jober
Tanja: Laura Kjær
Karsten: Stanislav Sevcik
Emil: Saxe Rankenberg Frey
Frederik: Michiel de Jong
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.