If in Lukas Moodysson’s cult comedy Together (2000), post-1968 sexual liberation and “officialised” promiscuity were presented as a colourful, hilarious roller coaster where kids might be overlooked but at least get to have fun, a quarter of a century later, Jens Sjögren’s Bloody Men feels like a more sober update, told from a coming-of-age perspective. Is it that usually-progressive Swedes have become more conservative, or are the generations who grew up amidst this social experiment now old enough to assess its pros and cons?

The film, which has screened at the Warsaw Film Festival, does not provide an answer to this, but its more constrained tone spiced up with some rather bitter humour, coupled with the popularity of Andrev Walden’s eloquently titled bestselling novel Bloody Awful in Different Ways, on which it is based, and the angry, anti-machoist nuance of the film’s title, may hint that times have changed.

From the awkward opening scene where a boy, Andrev (Vilgot Avenäs Thorslund), is awoken by moaning in the shared family bed because his mum's lover thinks "we shouldn't hide our love from the kids", it becomes clear that the generally amusing liberties of free love will be called into question – not so much from a moral standpoint, but rather through the lens of common sense. Growing up with seven different men in a row at a formative age, albeit in accordance with a relationship of serial monogamy, while your dad with supposedly Indian roots is God knows where, is not a particularly sustainable situation.

After the first partner freaks out, hitting Andrev, his mum, Mona (Aliette Opheim), moves them out, leaving his sister behind, only to begin seeing a string of further unstable guys, with things escalating each time: the jealous moustachio who tries to win the kids over with an aquarium and then throws it out of the window in a fit of rage; the drunkard weeping outside the window; the admittedly handsome but psychopathic bloke with drug and delinquency issues… And the list goes on. "Everyone wants to make love to Mum," as Andrev's sister concludes, but this excess of passion also comes with male possessiveness, emotional outbursts, aggression and overall toxicity, while the woman herself is not particularly innocent either, as she demonstrates the same blindness with each subsequent choice. But she is lucky in one way: her boy is a calm, silent observer, instead of the troubled teenager he could so easily have become.

Indeed, through Andrev’s eyes and his transformations at different ages, as embodied by three different young actors (Felix Östergren and Ludvig Eriksson in the later stages), Sjögren allows us to witness the adults’ inadequacy and utter failure to make sense of a so-called free relationship. The boy’s sensitivity, which may or may not be related to his frequent nose bleeds, as his mum implies, and his surprisingly mature, apparently instinctive emotional awareness give us hope that, instead of being infected by male anger, he might just become the opposite by learning the hard way. His unrestrained vulnerability and urge to truly connect, along with the conversations about sex that he has with his pal, revealing them as truly soulful individuals, culminate in the tender romantic episode of Andrev’s “first time”, which competes in nervous excitement with the immortal scene from Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty. This, together with the fact that Bloody Men is conceived by men, including the book’s author and Jakob Beckman as Sjögren’s co-scriptwriter, adds to the portrait of a potential forthcoming male generation that is perhaps softer and less masculine than their predecessors, but hopefully more capable of handling the complexity of gender relations when partnership, rather than dominance, is the value being sought.

Bloody Men was produced by Sweden’s B-Reel Films.