Red Dot is a Swedish film released on Netflix US on February 11, 2021. Directed by Alain Darborg and written by Darborg and Per Dickson, Red Dot is a hybrid of survival horror, backwoods horror, and folk horror – more specifically, it’s part of a subgenre I call survival folk horror. Other examples include Deliverance (John Boorman, 1972), Eden Lake (James Watkins, 2008), and Calibre (Matt Palmer, 2018).
The film follows Stockholm couple Nadja (Nanna Blondell) and David (Anastasios Soulis), along with their dog Boris, as they decide to head north to isolated Bear Valley to ski, camp, and see the Northern Lights. On the way there, as they stop to get gas, they encounter two hunters who suggestively mock David as a “pretty boy” and eye Nadja, who is Black with a kind of contemptuous sexual aggression. Both David and Nadja are unnerved by this encounter, especially after David sees a gun and a severed reindeer head in the back of their truck. Pulling away from the gas pump, he bumps their truck, leaving a small dent. They drive away nonetheless.
Check out the trailer for Red Dot:
Pulling up later at the inn where they’ve booked a room for a few nights, the woman at the bar refuses to talk to them and walks away. When a man comes up, he tells them, “Sorry about Mona. She doesn’t like strangers. She’s not a racist, but . . . ” and trails off. That suggestion lingers, though—and has lingered in all of David and Nadja’s encounters since they left Stockholm. The two men from the gas station happen to be drinking at the inn and, when David and Nadja set off the morning after, they find their car scratched and their “Hund i bil” (Dog on board) sticker vandalized to read “Svartskalle i bil.” Netflix translates “svartskalle” as “darkie,” and it is in fact a derogatory word used to denote a dark-haired or non-European person. When David and Nadja see the hunters’ black truck pulled up at a store a bit later on, Nadja makes David stop while she runs up and scratches a deep line across the side of their truck.
The apparently hostile hunter at the gas station
That’s the set-up—and no one will be surprised by what follows. After Nadja and David set up camp in an incredibly isolated spot, they wake in the middle of the night to find themselves targeted—the red dot of the title literalized as they are hunted by someone wielding a high-powered rifle. The middle of the film is occupied with their effort to flee in an incredibly cold and inhospitable environment.
David and Nadja are hunted in a frozen, inhospitable landscape
The plot of Red Dot thus far is relatively familiar, although it stands out for the beautiful landscape, perfect pacing, and great performances from the two leads. They are vulnerable and hunted—and bewildered about why they are being hunted. As Nadja says at one point, “What have we done?” David replies, “We haven’t done anything.” Nadja will repeat, here and later, “We just scratched a car.” Red Dot is akin to films such as Deliverance and Eden Lake—survival folk horror in which characters fall afoul of hostile locals for no apparent reason, simply because they are outsiders, urban, and, in the case of Nadja, Black in a white, rural northern Sweden (the danger of “hiking while Black,” pointed out by Candice Pires, seems relevant here).
[SPOILERS AHEAD]
You’ll see reviews saying that it’s hard to talk about Red Dot without talking about the last third or so—and that’s true. So, you’ve been warned. But the real significance of Red Dot emerges in this final third.
After they briefly find refuge in a hut, Nadja tells David she’s pregnant. While he is ecstatic at this news, something strange happens the next day. David appears to see a boy in a yellow coat. He collapses and tells Nadja, “I can’t get him out of my head. I can’t be a dad.” What then unravels is a story that shows Nadja and David are far from innocent; they are being hunted for a reason, not because they are a mixed-race couple from progressive Stockholm who dared to venture into the regressive hinterland.
Red Dot asks whether David and Nadja have the right to be happy, to take a vacation
David and Nadja hit a boy with their car when Nadja was engaged in distracting David; they killed the boy, and left him in the road. They never called the police, never owned up. They are being hunted not by hostile locals but by his family. Indeed, the boy’s father turns out to be their neighbor in Stockholm, Thomas (Thomas Hanzon), who has been stalking them for most of their year and a half in the city. He’s seen them dining, laughing, moving on (even though, to be fair, that isn’t the whole picture). After his plan to shoot David and Nadja the night they were camping failed, Thomas decides to enact a more poetic justice: he tells David to kill his unborn child; maybe Nadja will survive, maybe not.
Red Dot, then, turns into a slightly different film—one related to the brilliant Scottish film Calibre, in which two weekend hunters accidentally shoot a local boy in the Highlands and become themselves subject to the vengeful wrath of the locals. Nadja and David’s culpability also makes one ask whether the urban characters in such films as Deliverance or Eden Lake are, in fact, entirely “innocent.” In all cases, city folk act like someone else’s home is a playground, one that seems to license a reckless disregard for the local inhabitants.
David and Nadja are forced to face the consequences of what they’ve done
Red Dot is also even more interesting in terms of its racial politics after the twist—after David and Nadja’s culpability—is revealed. They killed a white child and, in return, Thomas wants their biracial child dead. Whatever Thomas’s justification—and it’s a powerful one, though to such awful ends that even his friend wants him to reconsider—his actions are directed toward symbolically destroying a multicultural Sweden. As I’m currently exploring in a larger project, one of the principal narrative dynamics that has driven folk horror since its emergence in the late 1960s is anxiety over decreasing rates of white, native-born children and increasing rates of immigration. One of the really interesting things about Red Dot is that it weaves this demographic anxiety into a plot that also depicts its protagonists as very far from innocent.
Red Dot is streaming on Netflix.
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