What makes it different from others?

Waste of time

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

Boring, long, and too preachy.

I thought the movie was very well done and made some very interesting interpretations meant to be thought about the real world, cities, etc... all things people have said, but what I didn't see was that this place is a form of purgatory for people who committed suicide. I believe that this is why there were so many middle aged middle class white people. Also the lack of children and not too many elderly. I agree with most posters that the first scene was not real because of the kissing being the same lifeless, emotionless stuff. But I do think that Andreas killed himself anyway before he got there. He seems rather depressed at all times and never so much as asks questions until he finds the violin music. I also realize that the others took some time possibly to get used to this place and started to understand what it took to at least get the "good" things that were there so they fell in line to at least be able to receive these things. Andreas took it too far and tried to reach the Heaven where people who didn't kill themselves went and then he did not fall back in line when given the opportunity before they took him back to the bus stop. I think that others may have experienced this and when they were told "aren't you happy here" by the older woman at the end they may have decided that this was probably a good idea as opposed to going with the men in the jump suits. Just my interpretation. Curious to hear what others think.

The fact that this work has been critically acclaimed these days testifies to how low people's tastes have dropped. Yet another farcical melodrama featuring such novel emotive device such as bodily amputations, nostalgia for the idyllic life and caricature of materialism. Yes, people these days watched Hollywood too much that they forgot about these themes which have been repeated million times by junk literature writers, but that does not make this movie less banal. The screen writer seems to hold the belief that his audience is so stupid and insensitive these days that he can just stuff all these well-rehearsed themes into one big splash and get away with it. It is unfortunate that people do seem to respond that way.

I came out from this movie with a lot of different ideas about the symbolism presented in the movie, but I had no idea there were so many different ways to interpret it until I read the IMDb comments. I will not go into all the other interpretations presented here, but they are certainly worth reading. It's a story about society, the mind, reality, death, pain, anxiety, love, art, hopelessness, fear and almost everything that can be put in a movie coherently. Not only is it a masterpiece, it was, to me, such a deeply profound movie that it opened up a whole new way of seeing the world, and reality.I believe most of the events and situations in the film represent abstract symbolic feelings and emotions that can be applied to our normal lives. The train scene can represent the anxiety about death, injury and the vivid imagination we can have about how we die or how scary violent and gruesome events can be. His life there can represent depression and alienation from the unknown world that we are surrounded with, and the train scene can be our fear of death that stops us from committing suicide and thus go back to our less than optimal lives.It also tells us reality is cruel in its neutrality, it does not know nor care about any living organisms in its path, and its destructive force can be brutal and unrelenting in its ignorance. We as humans must deal with this random reality, and we have to live with the pain and violence that may meet us at some point, and which does indeed strike many people everyday. The way the train stops when Andreas is lying on the tracks tells me even more about how cruel and random the world can be, it doesn't just let you die, it rubs it in in the worst possible way.Andreas' return home as a bloody mess only to be met by a neutral girlfriend who asks if they want to go go-karting can represent the feeling of despair we can feel inside, but are unable to communicate to others nor get a response from them. The hole in the wall can similarly be an abstract hope of all the good things one can experience, the positive euphoric possibilities granted by reality, which is not all bad, but all extreme poles of evil and bad, to good and blissful euphoria. Finally the finger cutting scene is a perfect example of how we have to experience every sensation - brutal pain included, and the desperate feeling of seeing your finger cut off (and the shocking surprise of actually realizing what is happening) but reality remains static and uneventful even so. You are alone, completely alone, in your experience. The movie tries to be neutral, the way I see it, but there is underneath the obvious dystopia, an even more fundamental despair. The fact that he is left in an icy snow world as an immortal is beyond cruel, because he will feel frost and solitude, but never die presumably. This can also symbolize how some people are completely rejected from society. The movie was to me extremely scary. It was among many things a psychological and existential horror movie. I am glad I saw it, but I also regret it, because ignorance can sometimes be a GOOD thing.

I watched 'The Bothersome Man' ('Den brysomme mannen'), directed by Jens Lien, quite a while ago, but it stuck with me. These are just my thoughts on it, not a conventional review. I was impressed by the way the film's surrealism juxtaposed the very deliberately superficial depiction of reality. The satirical element of the film appears almost to exaggerate the day- to-day monotony of both professional and domestic routine, transforming emotional coldness into emotionlessness, the characters' wants into complete materialism, and rendering human functions such as eating, drinking and fornication into meaninglessness tasks without pleasure, but with an acknowledgement of the idea of what 'pleasure' may be. This would seem to counteract the ideals of hedonism, but actually it appears to depict that the character's are in fact extremely hedonistic; seeking beauty and luxuries, but that they have merely lost the ideas of what values lie beneath things…the characters seem so preoccupied with the idea of pleasure that they have forgotten what it is to feel it. Darkly comedic from start to finish.I don't want to give any spoilers so I will leave it at that. But I highly recommend this film, even aside from the engrossing plot, it was very well made.