The most ordinary man shares the most ordinary events in his life. He is an ordinary real estate agent whose father is dead, but who still usually holds his mother’s hand. He has an ordinary bed. Yet he feels as if he is guilty of something, but cannot really see his role in it all.

Andersson’s tableau vivant, or living picture, was an attempt to deal with the Nazi past of modern Europeans. He has said, “This movie does not speak plainly about our complicity in the 1940s and the Nazi era. But society has a tremendous ability to dismiss an unpleasant issue when it has been ‘settled’, by saying that it belongs to this or that era and is no longer relevant. But society should not be given that chance!” In his view, history started with Auschwitz.