Headscratchers / Evil (2003)

• How is possible that prior to Erik Ponti's actions no one, absolutely no one, denounced the abuse endured by the students at Stjärnsberg? The Student's Council could have forced the students to not say anything at school, but during holidays, any student could have told their parents and they could have hired a lawyer like Erik's family did and the whole bullying problem could have ended a long time ago!
  • The abuse has been normalized within the context of the school. The people who attend it are all connected to the same small aristocratic clique, and they view the hazing, bullying and downright abuse as a normal and necessary part of growing up. Erik is an outsider who challenges these notions. Stjärnsberg is also based on the real-life experiences of the novel's original author, Jan Guillou.
  • The lawyer is only able to intervene because of a small technicality: the bullies interfered with the delivery of mail, which is a breath of secrecy of correspondence laws. Abuse can be swept under the carpet (victims and witness can be intimidated into keeping quiet), but a letter handled by the postal service leaves a trail, which provides evidence against the school.
• If Erik's stepfather is such a sadistic and horrendous assshole who delights on beating up his stepson for the sake of it, why did Erik's mother marry him in the first place? What did she see in him?
  • Abusers are good at hiding their true nature until their victims become trapped in some way. If they don't make their victims physically dependent on their goodwill in some manner they often do so psychologically. An abuse victim is often convinced that they are either in an inescapable situation or that they are not in an actually abusive situation. They might not be thinking along those lines at all.
• Why doesn't Erik try to tell the swimming coach about the Student's Council’s abuses? The Adults Are Useless trope is played straight for most of the film, but the swimming coach seems to be a decent guy, so why not inform him about some of the Council's acts? Perhaps he could have done something, because, as far the faculty knew, the Council just slapped or smacked the students for disobeying the rules, but didn't know that they could throw poop into their rooms...
  • Erik is told at the start to not make any waves whatsoever if he is to graduate. In his eyes, telling the swimming coach would not have accomplished much beyond jeopardizing Erik's last chance at an education.
• Why don't the Student's Council consider the possibility that Erik would have frozen to death after they left him tied up there? Erik would have surely died if Marja hadn’t come to rescue him, and the Council would likely not have gotten away with murdering a "rebellious student".
  • The student council did leave him to die. The school's default attitude to anything the students did outside of class was to look away. One can infer that the school had the political and economic clout to make even the murder of a student go away if necessary. It is not unheard of for boarding schools to cover up murders or even hide that deaths have occurred in real life, either.
• Why does Marla inform the headmaster that Erik was the father of her child? If having sexual intercourse with a staff member was against the rules, wouldn’t it have been better to lie and say that the father was a boyfriend who was around her age and whom she met outside of the school where she works? By the way, why did the school fire her for being pregnant? She could still work at the kitchen.
  • The film is a period piece that takes place in the 50s. Marja is a working-class girl from a country that was historically treated as a colony by Sweden in a school filled with the descendants of the nobility. Sexism, classism, a vast power differential and a deeply conservative worldview (including an actually enforced rule against fraternization) by the school meant she never stood a chance in hiding the details of the relationship or keeping her job.
• What happens with Marja at the end? Is Erik going to leave her and his unborn child alone or is he gonna go to live with them at some point? Some people across the Internet say that Erik will go to live with Marja, but Erik never says that in the film and it could be a bit complicated to raise his child with Marja while working for that legal firm...
  • Erik makes a mention near the end of the movie that he is going to visit Marja in Finland.