Once again the structure of Andersson’s work is a series of very loosely linked vignettes, almost all single takes with an almost total absence of close-ups, ranging from the dry and droll to the absurdist, but with also some more sobering images of wartime, ranging from the ruins of Cologne, being observed by a middle-aged couple flying over the ruins, to Hitler mulling his final moves in the bleakness of the Führerbunker, and this juxtaposition is a recurring motif for the filmmaker, reminding one of the darkly comic ending of You, The Living, with a huge flying armada of bombers appearing over a city, a scene which is held for an uncomfortably long time.

He also sticks to his style of casting, the people on screen being pale, haunted, almost worn down by the simple act of existence, and are often elderly, ailing or somehow hobbled, and Andersson’s Stockholm, actually here being several streets recreated, through sets and model work, at his studios, is grey and concrete, the sun never seeming to break through the clouds, the entire colour palette almost being the range of a greyscale. Those listed in the cast are simply identified as ‘Flying Woman’, ‘Woman on the Street’, ‘Psychiatrist’ or ‘Man With Stick’, the one major exception being Magnus Wallgren as Adolf Hitler.

Andersson has been called a miniaturist working on a large canvas, and those who have seen and know his intricately and painstakingly crafted features will understand how that can seem, delicately formed sketches making a larger whole, and while Roy Andersson and his idiosyncratic world may baffle and alienate some, he also has his devout admirers, as seen in the reviews, as IndieWire called it ‘The least funny and most tender movie that Andersson has made since building his own studio with the profits he’d saved from decades of enormously successful commercial work, About Endlessness adopts the same qualities of life itself: it’s both short and infinite’, while Variety believed ‘If we’ve been here before, the immaculate, somehow tender-hearted execution of About Endlessness ensures this is not a complaint’ and CineVue saw the film as ‘Made up of a series of related but not necessarily connected vignettes, each filmed with a static camera, they resemble New Yorker cartoons scripted by Samuel Beckett’. The Guardian noted it’…contains moments of devilish wit, but at heart it is a sad, sweet picture, threaded with themes of estrangement and separation. Andersson isn’t exactly asking us to laugh at or pity these people. Instead, we’re being encouraged to wonder at their predicament - and perhaps relate it to our own’ as Empire wondered ‘Lord knows how it all connects, but there's a strange power in how About Endlessness flows, jumping around the whole spectrum of human experience and the ridiculous places to which our emotions push us. Andersson's pigeon is at flight once more, and cinema is a richer place for it’.