The dramatic comedy “Kattriket” is a mysterious robber story.

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The engineer Kenneth is unemployed, unshaven and short-tempered. He spends the little money he has on advanced model building of cars and airplanes, which his pregnant girlfriend doesn’t appreciate. By chance he comes into contact with the disheveled marine biologist Sten, who offers him money for various small jobs. But Kenneth soon realizes that Sten has other plans for him, which may involve a crime involving the government. Is Sten a foil hat or has he found traces of a real conspiracy?

“Cat Kingdom” is set at the turn of the 80s and 90s, where submarine violations still live on in the collective consciousness. It’s a worn-out Sweden, populated by disgraced types – who ensure that the compartment of the memory bank opens wide to strange existences: there’s a little Alexandersson/De Geer and Aki Kaurismäki, a little Roy Andersson, and no one would look askance at Jan Lööf’s “Scrap-Nisse” if they came by. It’s dusty and dusty, ruffles and bows, undershirts with deep coffee stains.

It’s a bit Alexandersson/De Geer and Aki Kaurismäki, a bit Roy Andersson…

If the protagonist Stefan Larsson (no, not Dramaten-Stefan) looks familiar, it might be because you saw him in Songs from the Second Floor (as the brother of the dark poet who “wrote poems that made him dizzy”). Picked up off the street back then, rarely seen in the cinema since then, but here he is perfect as a man caught up in life. So does Björn Andersson (“The Unlikely Killer”), who does his Sten with obvious conviction – and if you’re wondering where Nermina Lukac, the main character in 2012’s gold-bug magnet “Eat Sleep Die,” has gone, here’s where to find her charming character.

The feature film debutant Director and screenplay duo Bernhard Rasmusson and John Hellberg have put together a subtle heist story with sepia-toned moods and visual effects that are prettier than the presumably low budget would allow. But no matter how much I sympathize with the aesthetics, the nostalgia and the main character, “Kattriket” leaves me with the feeling of a Western climax. The story, with all its small, lush secondary traces, sinks… perhaps not into nothingness, but into a philosophical argument of a somewhat tamer kind that does not satisfy the hunger for answers that the premises arouse.

“Kattriket” looks like a pilot episode of a somewhat lackluster series that promises more, but unfortunately no further episodes will follow. But we’ll see the quirky firm of Hellberg & Rasmusson again, because they’re on their way to something big.

See more: More Swedish dirty stories: “P & B” (1983), “Hassel. Privatspanarna” (2012), “The Top of Nothing” (2018).

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