After Closer and We Don’t Live Here Anymore, Sweden offers up yet another indictment of wedded misery in straightsville. Daybreak intercuts the lives of three unhappy couples and writer-director Björn Runge takes us to hell and back over a 24-hour period, destroying and then resurrecting all involved.

Skilled surgeon Rickard (Jacob Eklund) is passed over for promotion, but has already sold the family home. Bored with his bourgeois life we later learn he’s been cheating on his wife Agnes (Pernilla August) with his colleague and bestfriend’s wife Sofie (Marie Richardson) who he callously dumps when she tells him she’s pregnant with his child.

Anita (Ann Petrén) wallows in the abandonment she feels three years after her husband Olof (Peter Andersson) left her for a younger, prettier physiotherapist. Addicted to bitterness and prescriptive drugs she peddles Rohypnol in an underground car park, one day trading drugs for a stun gun, which she then uses to torture her ex and his trophy bride.

Workaholic builder Anders (Magnus Krepper) is also having marital difficulties, but is quickly kicked into touch about what’s important when he’s asked to brick up the windows and doors of racist couple Knut and Mona’s (Ingvar Hirdwall and Marika Lindström) home.

Daybreak thinks it’s deeper than it actually is because the questions it asks are trite and unanswerable. At one point Rickard says to his wife, “Don’t you ever get the peculiar feeling of ‘Is this all?’” and both his and Anita’s behaviour boils down to a modern day malaise. Despite a life that fits the textbook definition of happiness; neither are satisfied with what they had and ironically find that by seeking out ‘something else’ they lose it.

Runge may be stating the obvious, but Daybreak is a sophisticated tableau of disintegrating relationships. As we hopscotch between the warring couples one truly gripping revelation after another keeps the momentum flowing. All involved are either mad, bad or sad, but in the most part dislikeable, making it difficult to sympathise or empathise with their individual plights.

It’s the same feeling you get from rubber necking, fascinated by the disaster you can’t believe what you’re seeing and you’re glad it’s not you.

Daybreak is released in the UK on 16 September 2005

Delve into some new gay films that have just been released on DVD - À Toute Vitesse, Sugar, Super 8 1/2 and No Skin Off My Ass, Skin Flick and Hustler White. Buy them online and save yourself some money to start a film library!