What I'm going to discuss is not extremely story relevant and I'm not going to spoil major plot points but if you want to go entirely unspoiled into the film, don't read ahead.

Kollektivet (The Commune) was an extremely honest, real life, down-to-earth drama. It's so honest, that it almost deserves to film, compared to the general landscape of block buster Hollywood flickers. In many films, there is an obvious asshole, a scapegoat, maybe only an irrational dork, just any bad faith actor where you can unload your feelings of guilt, hate, shame ... sometimes even undeservedly so. This character will be burnt at the stake, fully conforming to the drama pyramid, and catharsis ensues. The catharsiser the better. In Kollektivet, this character is missing. Of course there are many films like that but maybe not so much in mainstream and/or on my radar. This makes it very sad to see the drama unfold since there can only be a break. No way of smooth resolution.

This unsmooth resolution happens towards the end of the film. I was very touched.

On a side-show of the film, there was a kid who had a severe heart problem and was going to die when he is 9 years old. He uses "I'ma die when I'm going to be 9 years old" as a quasi-ice breaker with girls of his age. It seems to work (whatever that means). Even though it's a terrible fate for him and his parents (who all live in the titular commune) it's taken in a sort of jovial manner. Up to the moment where he seemingly dies in the middle of the film but after a brief visit at the hospital is brought back to the house in the same evening. All good.

Towards the end of the film, the viewer asks themself, whether the kid is going to die again (likely for good). And of course, he does. Right after the big catharsis/unsmooth resolution/break of the drama. So even tough we, the viewers, might be moved to tears about the fate of the main characters with the actual dramatic turn, our attention is yanked away and steered to the kid dying in the living room, everybody being super upset, seeing a time skip, the commune throwing the ashes of a cremated kid into the sea, all accompanied by Elton John singing Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. This death is arguably worse than the actual dramatic twist of the film from the characters point of view but in terms of emotional involvement of the viewer, it's the other way around.

As we might be used in post-modern cinema (or art in general), juxtapositions like this are not uncommon. The artists make us cry and laugh at the same time or make us feel the vanity of the universe just to supersede it by a funny joke. Comic relief. Television. Simulacra all the way down. Yet Vinterberg's approach felt a bit different. Almost as if a modernist tries to implement a post-modern twist on only half-succeeds. Most of the action (and parts of this kid-dying-sequence) throughout the film are so sincere just to be half-assedly subverted at the end by something that only from the viewer's perspective seems mildly inadequate but not out of proportion left some impression on me.

Apart from that, the rest of the film is also very good and in my opinion a bit underrated on IMDB.