Ondskan is about teenager Erik Pontis (the charismatic Andreas Wilson) struggle to become educated in the face adversity. Erik is too handsome and self-contained for his own good, as he becomes a magnet for violence. At home his stepfather (Johan Rabaeus) takes sadistic pleasure in whipping him with a collection of belts, while his mother in the next room violently plays the piano to cover-up the noise of the beatings. Erik releases his anger on the school playground against other boys, but one beating he delivers results in his expulsion and being branded Evil.
In desperation his mother (Marie Richardson) sells some of her family heirlooms and sends him off to a boarding school in the north of Sweden. Erik knows that if he is to amount to anything he must get an education, and that this may be his last chance. He promises his mother that he will be good, not an easy promise for a lad who appears to be a natural born killer. Is it true that once a bully, always a bully?
But the school that has accepted Erik for his mothers money is not your normal country progressive boarding school. It is the 1950s and this is Stjarnsberg Academy, a school that attracts the children of aristocrats, the super wealthy, and Swedish diplomats serving overseas, and then fills its empty places with other adolescents whose parents can pay the fees.
Stjarnsberg, teaching towards the gymnasium final examinations (like the old lower and upper sixth form) has evolved its own social structure. It is not a large school, but the head and staff have devolved discipline to the upper students. When they were lower students they suffered, and now that they are uppers they seek their revenge. The students, through their upper-form council, have evolved their own set of rules and ways of enforcing them that the staff tolerate, or even support, based on their own conservative attitudes. It is just hazing that they experienced when students, so whats the matter?
The council administers corporal punishments on a scale ranging from being hit on the head with the handle of a knife and stabbed with a sharp glass vinegar bottle top to being punished in the ring where the culprit must fight two students and the loser crawls out of the ring. The final punishment is expulsion. This is what Erik wants to avoid at all costs.
Erik is a champion swimmer, and though a new lower form student, he demonstrates that he can beat the speed of all the others in the 50m crawl.
He makes it on to the team, and the coach tells him that if he wins the tournament he would be untouchable. If only life worked like that. Erik does stand up to the torments of the upper formers, led by Otto Silverhielm (Gustaf Skarsgard) with his sidekicks Dalen and Johan (Jesper Salen and Filip Berg). There is no punishment like digging a metre square hole and then having to fill it in again. Now who really is evil?
This is a film that seems to repeat old school themes, but actually tackles them in new ways.
Erik is made to room with Pierre Tanguy (Henrik Lundstrom), the schools most promising student academically, but he is short and non-athletic.
They become best of friends. He acquaints Erik with the writings of Gandhi, and for a while it looks like Erik is using non-violent tactics, even to the point of repeatedly turning the other cheek. Erik develops his capacity to say, No and accept the consequences. He welcomes eight weeks of house arrest because it means he doesnt have to go home on a break to his stepfathers beatings.
Pierre, for Christmas, gives Erik a giant compendium of Swedish laws. It wont be long before they recognise that what is happening at Stjarnsberg Academy is in violation of the students basic rights.
Erik, who because of council punishments is often late to meals, makes friends across another forbidden line with a kitchen-maid Marja (Linda Zilliacus), a Swedish-speaking Finn from Savolaks. When he does not show up after an exceptional punishment, it is she who saves him, but with unusual consequences for both of them. Ondskan is one hour and 53 minutes long. It is in Swedish with English subtitles. It is rated 16 plus because of violence and language. It is directed by Mikael Hfstrm to a script by the director and Hans Gunnarsson based on an autobiographical novel by Jan Guillou.
The cinematographer is Peter Mokrosinski; the editor is Darek Hodor; and the music is by Francis Shaw.
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