The new film from Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund takes aim at obvious targets, and makes a mess of hitting them

Strident, derivative and dismayingly deficient in genuine laughs, Ruben Östlund’s new movie is a heavy-handed Euro-satire, without the subtlety and insight of his breakthrough movie Force Majeure, or the power of his comparable Palme-winning spectacle about the art world, The Square. This film, on the other hand, congratulates itself deafeningly on being against the cruelty of the global super-rich, against the trite culture of fashion, against the vapidity of social media influencers. It uses a howitzer to shoot drugged fish in a barrel, inserts flabby lite-surrealism where the comedy might otherwise go and the plot turns out to be a retread of Jm Barrie’s stage-play The Admirable Crichton.

Everything of interest happens in the first ten minutes. A male model called Carl (Harris Dickinson) senses after...