What doesn’t kill you supposedly makes you stronger. In the case of the sneakily incisive new Swedish dark comedy "Force Majeure," however, what doesn’t kill you may also reveal your deepest faults to all of your loved ones. And they are not impressed.  

A pleasant, seemingly regular family is on a long weekend skiing trip into the French Alps. According to wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli), husband Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) needs a break from work for some solid family focus time with their two kids. They seem like a nice happy family – their photos on the mountain look cheekily cheery, and they all even wear matching blue long underwear to bed – even if, like those aforementioned photos, they're a bit posed. 

Thanks to writer-director Ruben Ostlund’s astute direction, however, there’s a chill in the air and not just because we’re on the snowy mountains. With the way he coldly frames the family spread out far across the frame, overwhelmed by the powdery white slopes, and uses deep focus, the happy family seems to be miles distanced from each other. Add in the ominous sounds of the slopes – the machinery droning and clacking, thunderous avalanche guns popping off throughout the day and night – and there’s a devilish sense of tension lingering throughout "Force Majeure."

And then an avalanche shows up.

Apparently, the family that skis together doesn’t always flee together. During the initial sudden chaos – terrifyingly captured in a long take by Ostlund – Tomas scampers away from his family for safety, abandoning Ebba and the kids to face the quickly impending wall of snow on their own.

The imposing natural disaster, however, winds up just providing merely a mild dusting of snow, hitting the lunching skiers as a light misty fog. Nobody’s hurt – except for Ebba and the kids’ feelings. As the trip goes on – and as Tomas continues to insist that Ebba is misremembering the events of that afternoon – that hurt and distrust continues to simmer and boil until an avalanche begins to seem like a bunny hill compared to the black diamond of marital distress that is the aftermath. Cue the zany accordion music; it’s time for fun with potential divorce and gender expectations.

If it seemed like there was some distance between the family members before, Ostlund only amplifies his smart framing and direction as "Force Majeure" goes along. Ebba, Tomas and the kids rarely seem to share the screen together, with characters isolated in their own shots, cut out of the frame or out of focus. Ostlund’s work is sneakily genius, intelligently using his camera to build the movie’s chilly drama and droll humor.

Plus, he’s got a gorgeous eye – and, thanks to his sound design, a deft ear – for the mountains (not surprisingly, he began his career with skiing films). He captures the natural beauty of the Alps, as well as their menacing intimidation with all the imposing blank white space and the sounds of booming avalanche guns and ominously clinking ski lifts.

"Force Majeure" visually serves as a great advertisement for the gorgeous French Alps, while the story is an equally terrible advertisement for marriage – albeit comically so. Tensions only amusingly escalate as the putzy and prideful Tomas refuses to admit his newly discovered shortcomings for the sake of protecting his at-risk sense of masculinity – amusingly mocked in moments like getting lost in an crazed frat-like orgy of testosterone.

Fellow ski lodge guests – like a female traveler whose refusal to define herself by the traditional roles of wife and mother confuse and rile Ebba – don’t help, especially a seemingly random though cleverly incorporated cute new couple that gets trapped playing marriage counselor for our rattled loved ones. After a lot of failed mansplaining ("Maybe you planned to go back and dig them out?"), tears and the most welcome drone attack in cinematic history, the young couple finds themselves infected by Ebba and Tomas’ growing marital strife, having similarly sly and darkly humorous arguments about their roles and the expectations they have for one another and themselves personally.

"Force Majeure" may leave some wondering if they just saw either one of the year’s funniest dramas or one of its most intense comedies. Either way, other than an ending that hits its mark and then somewhat skids a little past it, its discomforting blend of natural and domestic disasters works to icy cool perfection – especially those with a tolerance for socially awkward laughs. Ostlund's film offers a lot: his smart and beautiful direction, a sharp script and the two great, keenly calibrated lead performances.

Kongsli quietly simmers her bitter frustration just the right amount. Meanwhile, Kuhnke is both hilarious and tragic, his pathetic stubbornness slowly morphing into equally pathetic, sweatily palpable embarrassment as it becomes harder to escape what his instincts made him do. His painful – and painfully funny – bleating man-cry lament is worth the price of admission alone.

In the end, the movie’s pristine ski mountain setting is an ideal match for our wrecked patriarch protagonist and his surgically dissected masculinity. You can pretend you have everything calm, cool and under control, but you never know when eventually one’s natural instincts will burst out – for better or worse. And then it’s just a matter of cleaning up the debris afterwards. Luckily, in the case of the deviously entertaining "Force Majeure," the resulting disaster is one fine mess.