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Luigi Mangione stalks and shoots a healthcare CEO in the back and is celebrated by the anti-capitalist Left as a hero for the 99%. Shane Tamura murders a finance executive and three other victims in a shooting meant to target an NFL office, and is lauded by internet ghouls for “sending a message” to the rest of the 1%. Communist Zohran Mamdani openly declares that billionaires shouldn’t exist, and he is poised to become New York City’s next mayor. Search #EatTheRich on X and scroll through endless unhinged posts of jealous rage against the “privileged.”

All of this suggests that class warfare is rearing its ugly head in America more intensely than at any time since the Occupy Wall Street movement flourished, which makes An Honest Life, a 2025 Swedish thriller on Netflix, not only timely but surprisingly counterculture.

Some spoilers below…

In the film, a young Swedish student named Simon arrives at the prestigious Lund University to begin law school, but he is immediately swept up in a protest that turns violent. He is rescued from arrest by a masked rioter who spray-paints ominous revolutionary quotes on walls, such as “You’ve got the walls and balconies, we’ve got the ropes and daggers.”

At school, Simon, who was an aspiring writer until he realized he had nothing to write about, is bored silly by the stultifying rules and structure of the legal profession. He meets an attractive brunette named Max who has a dark, dangerous, and exciting air about her – indeed, she turns out to be the masked rioter – and she draws him into the orbit of a chain-smoking, retired political science professor whose book-stuffed bungalow is a sort of commune for perpetually drunk or stoned young anarchists who quote Sartre and Baudelaire. “Your acts and words must be aligned, otherwise you’re living a dishonest life,” he lectures them.

The professor pontificates further about inequity: “There is a bottomless chasm that separates the human race. Your life’s trajectory is not determined by your skills or merits or how hard you work. It’s shaped by inherited structures… It’s called privilege.” He goes on to criticize the welfare state as “quite an ingenious way to shield the economic elite from attacks on a system that only benefits themselves.”

This resonates with the lower middle class Simon, who is rooming with a couple of privileged snobs who flaunt their expensive watches and treat him like the help. But as he later learns, the professor’s followers are less revolutionaries than simple predators, and in Simon they recognize someone just naïve enough to exploit and mold into an accomplice. After he passes their test in a luxury watch store robbery, Max tells him, “You’re with us now. You’re with the bandits.”

“Let the wealth of others flow through you,” they tell Simon as they gift him one of the stolen timepieces. Max tells him, “Theft is the act of restoring and reclaiming property… We steal from those who don’t deserve what they have.”

She convinces Simon to break off with his roommates and join the commune, and these Robin Hoods go on to commit a serious break-in, shooting an eyewitness in the process, and fencing the expensive cars they steal. When the Professor confronts them about the crime, at the scene of which they recklessly left a spray-painted clue, they break off with him and he sneers at them for “buying your freedom.”

The irony, of course, is that it is the bandits who do not deserve what they have. They subsist by living off “the wealth of others,” as they explicitly stated earlier, others who may have been born into a world of privileged connections but who still worked hard to earn their way within that elite class. Simon’s bookish classmate, for example, whom Simon finds intolerably boring, obsesses over his studies and earns a passing grade. No one in the anarchist gang works at anything or aspires to anything except punishing and terrorizing rich capitalists while appropriating their luxury possessions.

An Honest Life is problematic in terms of story and character, especially for a flick described as a thriller. The pacing never quite smoothly accelerates, and as the protagonist, Simon never initiates, only reacts; more precisely, he is led around by his naïve attraction to Max at the cost of destroying his future and risking imprisonment. Even at the conclusion he is never able to fully break away from her emotionally or hold her justly accountable for the cruel, criminal ways in which she exploits his infatuation with her. His only epiphany comes when Max tells him that at least now he has something to write about.

A reviewer at Gazettely.com observes, “The film’s ultimate statement is one of deep cynicism; it presents a world where the establishment is corrupt and the revolution is a sham, leaving no room for hope and offering a politically inert, muddled message.”

Not quite. There is a political message, and it’s not so much muddled as unexpectedly – especially for a foreign film – nuanced about capitalists, and honest about the violent, parasitical jealousy of anti-capitalists and anarchists. Simon’s elite roommates may be privileged and snobbish, but their ringleader is genuinely distressed as his housekeeper, shot by Simon’s gangmates in a botched robbery, lies comatose in the hospital. Rightly outraged, he tells Simon that his housekeeper uses the money she earns working for his family to send her grandchildren to a private school in Santiago; she didn’t deserve to be targeted by anti-capitalists. “In what way does she not deserve what she has?” he asks Simon.

So the affluent capitalists, their elitism aside, are shown to be productive members of society who not only create jobs but have compassion for the less privileged. Meanwhile the anarchist professor is shown to be a bitter failure who cultivated not a following of intellectual ideologues but a gang of morally reprehensible monsters and drug addicts. Indeed, another reviewer was furious that what he saw as the film’s “hate-filled propaganda against the working class” treats the rich “sympathetically.” Clearly he wanted to see the usual Left-wing morality play featuring caricatures of the evil rich and the noble poor trapped by structural inequality.

But An Honest Life’s political message is more honest than that. It shows that capitalism, like human beings and life itself, is undeniably messy and imperfect, but the “revolution” is, as the critic put it, just a sham.

Follow Mark Tapson at Culture Warrior.