Play

Lena Andersson of Dagens Nyheter argued that both class and race are secondary in the film; that it rather captures the universally human abuse of power, and that it is provoking because it allows the audience neither to put blame on someone else nor to feel guilty about itself in an easily recognisable way. Andersson wrote: "What's troublesome with Östlund's film is that it holds up a mirror, for once not for the white to mirror its predominance in, but for the oppressed to see that he is capable to oppress. This burdens both parties. ... The perception of 'the other' follows the same mechanisms whatever the name of the group is and doesn't become prettier because the group suffers or has suffered."

Inspired by actual court cases, it portrays a group of black boys who rob a smaller group of white boys by means of a psychological game.

Åsa Linderborg, chief cultural editor of Aftonbladet wrote a column about the film. She described her encounter with a black man soon after watching Play: "Within a nano second, my involuntarily programmed brain rolled out the same confused trailer for the progression of history as it always does when I see a coloured human: slave ships, Tintin in the Congo, cotton plantations, Rwanda, ANC, Muhammad Ali, the Cosby family, I Have a Dream, negerbollar, Malcolm X, children with flies in the face, Obama, AIDS, Idi Amin... a suburban mob stealing cell phones. I refuse to believe that it is this - another cliché - that Ruben Östlund wants to achieve. But what is it he wants then?" America Vera Zavala responded to Linderborg in the same newspaper. Vera Zavala argued that the film is not about race at all but about class, and described Linderborg's text as "language populism". She expressed admiration of Östlund as "the long-missing star in the Swedish director sky. ... Someone who dares - despite the expected cliché accusations of racism - to describe a brutal class society where Swedes rob Swedes."

The film led to a public debate in Swedish mass media, which in particular saw many indignant reactions from the far left of the political spectrum. The debate was triggered when author Jonas Hassen Khemiri published a list in Dagens Nyheter, with the title "47 reasons that I cried when I saw Ruben Östlund's film Play". Among Hassen Khemiri's reasons were number six, "because I thought it was racist", and number 27, "because the audience laughed when the black robbers called a white guy an ape".