The Labyrinth, farm

Three aircraft hang over a Swedish farmyard like they have every right to be there, bellies lit by the low green sky, the nearest one stamped SÄK8 in white block letters. SÄK is short for säkerhet, Swedish for safety or security, and that small bureaucratic detail tells you most of what you need to know. Down between the weathered barns, what appear to be policemen in high visibility vests are searching for fugitives, and nobody is looking up. Whatever is happening here has already become routine, which is far more unsettling than panic would be.

Simon Stålenhag is a Swedish painter, born in 1984, who began as a nature and bird illustrator before he started slipping machinery into his landscapes. His books, including Tales from the Loop, The Electric State and The Labyrinth, have been adapted for television and film, and his method is always the same: paint the countryside he grew up around with complete sincerity, then add one impossible thing. The barn boards here, the muddy puddle in the foreground with its reflections, the scrubby grass at the edges, all of it is observed from real Swedish farmland. The hovering craft only work because everything surrounding them is so ordinary. The Labyrinth, his bleakest story, imagines a world where the sky itself has turned against people and survivors live in tunnels below, which gives these quietly busy workers an edge of something unspoken.