The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared

Audiences can expect to be shocked, confused and reluctantly amused by The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared.

Robert Gustafsson plays confronting, tortured, bomb-obsessed, anti-hero Allan Karlsson, whose ‘que sera sera’ attitude has led to him crossing paths with Presidents Truman and Reagan as well as Franco, Stalin and Oppenheimer in a disastrous stumble through one hundred years of living.

Allan’s escape from a retirement home and subsequent pursuit across Sweden by blood-thirsty bikies is used to tell his life story in horrifyingly gruesome detail, with perhaps a few too many gratuitous deaths to be effectively high-impact.

A healthy dose of black humour, cheap gags and philosophically complicated satire leaves the audience concerned they have witnessed the drawn-out retelling of a private joke they have never been privy to.

While never dull, The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared is more jarring and confusing than insightful or comedic. (LOC)

** /5