Swedish surprise. (Now Playing).(Swedish film about parenting)(Review)

"All adults are idiots."

That's the pronouncement made by Eva, a 13-year-old girl in 1975 Sweden, in the humorous and humane new film import Together. Most kids come to this conclusion sooner or later, but Eva has a particularly good reason for her disgust: Along with her younger brother Stefan and their mother Elisabeth, Eva has moved into a hippie household known as Tillsammans--Swedish for "together." What Eva quickly recognizes, and what the movie ultimately reveals, is that this loose collection of extremists, with their close-minded food restrictions and open relationships, doesn't have it together nearly as much as they think.

Throughout the film, the silly ideals of the adults--"Washing the dishes is so bourgeois," one of them announces after dinner--are punctured by the kids' sense of logic. When little Stefan is introduced to a housemate his age named Tet and the other boy explains that he's named after the Tet Offensive, Stefan intently asks, "Are you from Vietnam?" Later, tired of the house's enforced vegetarian diet, Stefan leads the other kids on a protest march through the kitchen chanting, "We want meat!"

For all its humor, there are darker moments here and there which paint the commune as a place of actual danger for the kids. Wine and cigarettes flow freely in a house with too many "parents" and no one doing any parenting. The result? Tet stops by Stefan's room one night before bedtime with a glass of wine, explaining that he's always careful not to get too drunk. When Stefan can't fall asleep later that night, he wanders through the strange, dark house in search of his mom, and writer-director Lukas Moodysson invests the sequence with a sharp sense of anxiety, as if it were part of a horror film.

The nominal leader of this house is Elisabeth's brother, Goran, played by Gustaf Hammarsten. Soft-spoken and gentle, Goran holds strong to his ideology, but you can see his stomach start to churn when ...