Something must break

Sebastian, a boy from Stockholm with a disturbing, androgynous beauty, risks his life having sex with strangers on industrial estates and waste ground. Just when everything seems certain to go very wrong, rebellious Andreas appears and saves him at the last minute. It is love at first sight for these two powerful characters, who begin an intense, impulsive affair together. It is mid-summer, and the two lovers take the half-empty city by storm: shoplifting from the 7-Eleven, dancing on roofs, sneaking into pools, crazy nights.

But Andreas is not so happy about the gay side to this relationship and, to quote the Joy Division song that gives the film its title, something must break… Ester Martin Bergsmark’s first feature film is a rough diamond, edgy and beautiful, delicate and wild, fragile and ruthless. In it, as in Bergsmark’s two first names, the masculine and the feminine are always entwined, each casting slivers of light onto events.