The Swedish actor is playing a bamboozled police officer in What Remains, a film written by his wife and starring one of his sons. He looks back on mixing Marvel with arthouse, taking risks with Lars von Trier and Sweden joining Nato

Stellan Skarsgård is speaking to me from his cabin, outside Stockholm, and why shouldn’t he look relaxed and happy, in those clement, sun-dappled surrounds? But it is so disconcerting. His performance in What Remains, as a battle-scarred police officer, trying to keep hold of his family, his bearings and his scepticism in the face of a criminological modernity that puzzles him, joins a body of knotty work that UK audiences would probably date back to Breaking the Waves, Lars von Trier’s 1996 classic. His smallest facial gesture speaks fathomless emotion. I am a huge Mamma Mia! fan – in which he plays Bill Anderson – so I have seen Skarsgård smile, but even then, not all the time.

What Remains is based, loosely, on a famous case in Sweden: it was the 90s, and the so-called “retrieved memory” technique was huge, even though in the US, where it was developed, it had already been disallowed as reliable evidence. “All psychologists in Sweden were using retrieved memory at the same time, a lot of men were put in jail for violating their children,” Skarsgård says. “It’s really the fabrication of memory. It was very optimistic, to think you can just open up the memory and look at it. Every divorce you’ve been through, you’ll know, the truth isn’t exactly as everybody says.”

‘Are you two the best we’ve got?’ It was a harsh question, but it summed up last night’s final leaders debate pretty well

Two cliches hovered over Wednesday night’s TV debate between Keir Starmer and Rishi Sunak – the first that the stakes were high, the second that Sunak had nothing to lose and Starmer had everything to lose, since he was on course for a victory so resounding that its foundations must be fragile. It’s simply not possible for nearly 50% of the country to agree on one leader, the logic goes, so Sunak’s job was to camp on Starmer’s contradictions, and scare away the undecideds with talk of Labour’s tax burden.

It makes sense on paper, but only in a world in which positive change is so unimaginable that the status quo represents safety and prosperity: all the audience questions suggested that it does not. Whatever their prescription, from closing the borders to making a better contract with young people, whether they were battling benefits sanctions or bankrupt local councils, the audience questioners were pretty unanimous on one point: everything’s broken. So Starmer’s job was to stick that broad-spectrum malaise on his Conservative opponent, and try to make sure none of it seeped out into a more generalised, will-sapping pessimism.