Video:

Songs From the Second Floor is presented in anamorphic widescreen. The picture is soft at times, but pixelation is rare (easy to achieve in a film with as little movement as this). The typeface for the subtitles can be difficult to read, though, as the letters are much taller than they are wide, giving them a crammed-together appearance.

Sound:

A simple stereo track is all that is provided, but also all that is necessary for the film.

Extras:

There is a feature length commentary track with director/writer Andersson and Ronny Svensson, who is not identified with having a role in the film. Svensson is there to act as interviewer on the track. It is entirely in Swedish with English subtitles. Andersson is interesting at times, breaking down each scene and helping to make sense of the sometimes-dense material. That he felt the need to interpret every scene, though, flies right in the face of one of his first statements on the commentary, "To me, it's pretty straightforward. Simplicity was my goal."

There are four deleted scenes, each with an explanation as to why they did not make it into the final cut. Two of the scenes were not included at all, while the other two did make their way in, just in different forms.

The most educational featurette shows three of the scenes as works in progress, including how precise the actors' blocking had to be. Since Andersson rarely ever moves the camera in the film, each actor had to hit his or her mark exactly in order to get across the image the director wanted. In a five-minute scene, it can be quite a challenge. There's also two minutes of behind the scenes footage.

The theatrical trailer included on the disc is one of the oddest I've seen. There is no dialogue, just the score and two second clips from every scene in the film, in the order they are presented. More coherent trailers are provided for Trembling Before G-d, Life and Debt, Chaos and Kandahar.

Final Thoughts:

There are messages scattered throught Songs From the Second Floor, but anyone in 2004 America will not be surprised by the ideas. Corporations are unfeeling. Commitment can be painfully and unfulfilling. People do mean things to other people, even those they love, sometimes for strange reasons. Life can be lonely. It takes Andersson 98 minutes to tell the audience that, but it is not anything new.