[1] It is based on the novel You Are the Roots That Sleep at My Feet and Keep the Earth in Place by Eli Levén [sv].
Saga Becker won the Guldbagge Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her performance as Sebastian/Ellie.
They dress in bright pink jackets, wear pearl necklaces, and have long, luscious hair.
They explore empty construction sites, dance on rooftops, and steal liquor from convenience stores and rich older men.
In the midst of their complicated love affair with straight-identifying Andreas, Sebastian increasingly aligns with a more feminine identity, and takes on the name Ellie.
Andreas reassures them that it will be okay, so long as they go “easy on the girlie stuff.” This comment shocks, hurts, and confuses Ellie.
They go to the bathroom to touch up their lip gloss and when they emerge, Andreas is singing karaoke and dancing up on Mattias.
They kiss one last time, and Ellie walks away in power, heading forward into a new chapter of their life.
Ester Bergsmark's Something Must Break distinguishes itself from other romance films in how it not just includes but reclaims and reappropriates the element of filth.
The aestheticized abject imagery creates “a cinematic world [characterized] as uniquely reflective of trans embodiment”.
[4][5] Something Must Break explores in filth the potential of a uniquely trans world-making, one that does not seek to conform or assimilate to what is considered pure and natural by cisheteronormative standards, but one that redefines the terms altogether, and in which the “impure” becomes a space of vulnerability, transformation and intimacy.
Something Must Break positions trans bodies in contaminated environments — polluted ponds, garbage dumps, and bathrooms.
The trans body is equally marginalized, decentralized, and is a threat of “contamination” to the dominant society.
[4][6] Moreover, the common narrative of the transgender experience often focuses on a beginning and an end — a before and after, where “after” is assimilation into the cisheteronormative society.
[4] Furthermore, in Something Must Break, it is in the contaminated environment that “the ‘unnaturalness’ of the gender non-conforming body and Sebastian and Andreas's confused relationship finds shelter”.
In the marginalized, peripheral spaces, Sebastian/Ellie finds refuge from the codes, norms, and structures of the dominant society.
Unlike other romance films with similar scenes, in Something Must Break, Sebastian/Ellie and Andreas’ enchanted oasis is a polluted pond, with litter scattered among the landscape and a concrete sewer conduit in the background.
[9] In the history of the Western world, the trans body has been medicalized and pathologized, viewed as deviant, perverted, contaminated, and mentally ill.[4][6][9] Researcher Wibke Straube, referencing the story of Leslie Feinberg — a trans activist and historian who suffered from Lyme disease for over three decades, but who did not receive proper treatment until the last few years of their life —, attributes to the trans body the notion of the unloved Other: “ the one that seems disposable, possibly even killable”.
Moreover, Sebastian/Ellie's contaminated body and the pleasure it receives are repeatedly shown in their full expression, and are also at the origin of queer connection.
Bodily fluids — waste, contaminants that are released from the body — are often portrayed in the film in the context of sex.
This highly stylized scene reminds the viewer of religious imagery and Renaissance paintings.
In doing so, Something Must Break subverts the Western society's conception of purity (religion) through the sanctification and beautification of the abject.