An Honest Life: Swedish Thriller Meets a Coming-of-Age Drama

By Karen Gordon

Rating: B

An Honest Life is an interesting if undemanding made-for-Netflix thriller that weaves together themes of classism, anarchy, and ultimately a young character coming to terms with who he is, and how far off the path of an ordinary life he’s prepared to go.

Simon (Simon Lööf) comes to the University of Lund in Sweden to attend law school. As we learn in his voiceover, this is not his passion, but a compromise he has made with his life. This small-town young man wanted to be a novelist but can't think of anything to write about. He’s already feeling like another cookie popped out of the cutter, so why not study law? At least it’s a solid living.

But right off the train, as he’s dragging his luggage through the city, he runs into trouble, a hint of what’s to come in his life. He walks smack into a protest between Swedish nationals and anarchists with their faces covered that’s turning violent.

In a case of mistaken identity, he’s pursued by a police officer who knocks him to the ground, only to be saved by an anarchist who beats the officer into unconsciousness, quickly treats his head wound and takes off.

That’s just the start of the first day of the rest of his life, as the saying goes. Simon has taken a room in a nice flat that he can't afford, with two fellow law students, two very rich kids, who wear their arrogance on their sleeves. The deposit costs him almost all his money, but his preference is for some luxury over the idea of living in a dorm.

Dorm life, on the other hand, is good enough for Fredde, a classmate who represents a kind of acceptance of a more ordinary life. Fredde is practical, not elegant, and not even aware of that. He sees law as a series of rules that you learn and not much more. We intuit that Simon finds him a bit dull, and the idea of learning rules and then living your life serving them is exactly the opposite of the way he wants to life his life.

To make ends meet, Simon takes jobs as a busboy or waiter. His smug rich-kid roommates begin to treat him like a waiter, asking him to both join their house parties, with the caveat that he serve at them too. Simon goes along with things, seemingly without much of a reaction.

Everything feels too dull, until Simon spies Max (Nora Rios) in the law library. They exchange a series of glances, but there’s something there. It turns out that Max is the person who intervened with the police officer. It’s a radical’s meet cute.

She begins to pursue him in a way that seems, from our distance as viewers, a bit less like romance, and more like seduction with an agenda. Her vibe is sexual, a bit dangerous, and completely withheld. She’s testing him, subtly pushing his boundaries to see how far he'll go, using the promise of sexuality as a way of bringing him along. Her ideas are antisocial, and illegal, so will he bite or will he bolt.

Max takes Simon home. She lives with a group of friends in a big, shabby, book-lined home owned by Charles (Peter Andersson), a semi-retired professor famous for his anarchist view. There are three other people besides Max who live there: two men and another woman. Who all seem to have the same anti-social views.

At first, they seem like a cult, built around a belief that most people don't deserve their wealth, and so why not relieve them of some of it? They're a ragged gang and the connection between them is a bit of a mystery, until Simon gets pulled into one of their heists and must decide which way he'll go.

The film — directed by Mikael Marcimain, based on the novel of the same name by Joakim Zander — hints at greater tensions in the world, radical ideas that present themselves in poetry as if violence was a higher or artier ideal. But the film isn’t after making a larger social statement.

It doesn't completely bite into some of the material that it touches on. But then, Marcimain isn’t focusing this film outward into the complications of the world.

An Honest Life puts Simon’s questions about who he is and how he wants to live his life out in front of him. He’s from an ordinary working-class family with no connections that will give him a leg-up start in life.

Simon isn’t an ideologue or a sociopath. He’s being pulled along in his life, putting one foot in front of the other, and in search of something. He’s responding to the basics of his own needs, perhaps unmet up until this moment in his life. In the end, it all comes down to which path he'll choose.

An Honest Life. Directed by Mikael Marcimain. Starring Simon Lööf, Nora Rios, and Peter Anderssson. Now streaming on Netflix.