This brief journal has spoilers.
Finally seeing this. Watched last night on Mubi.
There is a content warning for graphic violence, this works a bit like a spoiler. However, I appreciate this and honestly it might have done to warn me off-- my loss though if I had chosen to avoid it.
Too many good things in this movie, many of them visual. I love the high toilet in the poor family's house. The rich family's house does some lifting visually and the cinematography makes the most of it-- and everything. This is a fanastically framed movie, if I have any place saying it.
If I start listing everything good here it will be a long list and pointless since just go watch it.
However, the absolute peak is the scene where the poor family is on the rich family's couch at night during a rainstorm. The use of the couch to build tension is incredible, particularly sublime when the daughter sets her bottle of alchohol down on it, so extremely more drunk than anyone else. She is "dirty" framed in the background which makes it less certain how likely she is to knock over the bottle. It's perfect. (Also note the amazingly light note of "dog treats" she casually notices immediately before the doorbell rings.)
Spilling something on a couch is going to be a near-universal experience for anyone seeing this film, and the way this whole scene works-- for instance framing the rainstorm at the outset (on its own so beautiful) letting the viewer slowly realize that the camping trip will surely end early, even while the poor family is deliciously oblivious to this obvious fact-- then the whole interaction where the husband pretends to be angry at a cockroach comment, which finally cements his character as someone who has transcended his ego, and also works as an amazing general counterpoint to toxic behaviour by men, at the same time a sketch of a deep marriage relationship and strong mother-figure-- the dreams of marriage of the son-- well just all of it is here, it's so much more than "we know what's coming", it's: "this is everything about this family, balanced on a knife's edge."
To be honest about my feelings, I think the writing goes just a tiny bit downhill from here. Not right away— it is genuinely a perfect twist to have the doorbell be the housekeeper, and the bunker reveal, the blackmail-by-video, making explicit that the two poor families are really just at each others' throat for table scraps (and literally) from the rich family, the escape from the house, and the final flooding and refuge in a public gym (and the last cigarette smoked on the high toilet!)— but what falls over for me is the spirit of the movie turns dark and violent in a way that doesn't quite feel realistic or black comedy.
Anyways this is a quibble, but.
There is up until then an unbelievably perfect tension built up and it unravels just a tiny bit less cleverly than it raveled. A birthday party bloodbath is a little too much because everyone is so richly sympathetically drawn, and there just isn't a way to make room for the gravity of losing a child. They tried but there just isn't room here.
I of course am way over my head and have absolutely not the remotest clue how the writers could have wrapped this any differently, or maybe they would have missed their message otherwise. Part of this is me longing for a more innocent age.
So there you have it, what an incredible film, I only want it to be more than perfect.