John Skoog’s debut feature Redoubt has its UK premiere at this year’s London Film Festival. Inspired by the true story of Karl-Göran Persson, a farm worker in southern Sweden who, at the height of the Cold War, began fortifying his home with scrap metal to prepare for a war that never came, the film is as much about creation as it is about obsession.
Anyone constructing something on screen always catches my attention. Perhaps it comes from my own childhood spent building makeshift camps in the woods, then rushing home to watch The A-Team or MacGyver, where the heroes would build something ingenious from scratch to get out of trouble.
Shot in gorgeous black and white by Ita Zbroniec-Zajt, Redoubt looks like it could have been unearthed from the early 1900s. The cinematography is strikingly beautiful, its monochrome palette soaking into your eyes with a texture that feels both timeless and immediate.
At times, the physical mechanisms of its protagonist’s movements even recall silent cinema, Chaplin-esque in their rhythm, bordering on animation. Fans of Driving Mum or The Girl With The Needle will lap up this visual.
The film hinges on the performance of French actor Denis Lavant, best known for his work with Leos Carax (Holy Motors). On paper, casting him as Karl-Göran might seem surprising – a Frenchman embodying a Swedish farmer – but the result is nothing short of magnetic. Lavant trained in acrobatics and dance, and his physical command gives the role a raw believability. He even learned Swedish, mastering the local dialect, and inhabits Karl-Göran with an intensity that feels inseparable from the film itself.
Karl spends much of the film constructing his fortress from whatever discarded materials he can find – bikes, beds, buckets, farming tools – a patchwork shelter born out of fear and determination. To the adults around him, his actions mark him as unhinged, an eccentric out of step with the times. But the village children become his unexpected narrators, listening to his warnings, and defending him in ways that complicate our view of his supposed madness.
Skoog’s Redoubt leaves us questioning where it is all heading. Will there be an invasion? Is Karl’s obsessive labour in vain, or is he carving out a sanctuary that will grant him a strange form of local heroism?
It’s a peculiar, entrancing film – one that may frustrate with its elliptical ending but lingers long after the credits. Thanks to Lavant’s phenomenal performance and its hauntingly beautiful monochrome, you leave feeling as if you too had spent time inside Karl’s strange yet oddly comforting fortress.
Redoubt is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2025
