The three boys are seeking help in a coffee shop, and the owner offers shelter but does not feel the need to call the police, as requested.

At one point the conductor announces that a cradle has been found and should be picked up lest it would be removed for safety and fire precautions - the travelers chuckle.

Without phone to contact their parents and without money for the tram, they travel without a ticket; they do not explain the circumstances to the 2 conductors, get fined 1200 Kronas each and scolded for fare evasion.

[5] The film led to a public debate in Swedish mass media, which in particular saw many indignant reactions from the far left of the political spectrum.

The debate was triggered when author Jonas Hassen Khemiri published a list in Dagens Nyheter, with the title "47 reasons that I cried when I saw Ruben Östlund's film Play".

[7] Åsa Linderborg, chief cultural editor of Aftonbladet wrote a column about the film.

She described her encounter with a black man soon after watching Play: "Within a nano second, my involuntarily programmed brain rolled out the same confused trailer for the progression of history as it always does when I see a coloured human: slave ships, Tintin in the Congo, cotton plantations, Rwanda, ANC, Muhammad Ali, the Cosby family, I Have a Dream, negerbollar, Malcolm X, children with flies in the face, Obama, AIDS, Idi Amin... a suburban mob stealing cell phones.

Vera Zavala argued that the film is not about race at all but about class, and described Linderborg's text as "language populism".

She expressed admiration of Östlund as "the long-missing star in the Swedish director sky.

"[9] Lena Andersson of Dagens Nyheter argued that both class and race are secondary in the film; that it rather captures the universally human abuse of power, and that it is provoking because it allows the audience neither to put blame on someone else nor to feel guilty about itself in an easily recognisable way.