Appearances, disguises, and performance

Appearances, disguises, and performance are a recurring way the novel makes concealment visible: a scene can look warm and genuine while its construction remains false, and a person can enact victimhood while occupying the role of perpetrator. The motif moves between literal theatrical staging and the roles adopted by Sofia Zetterlund, whose memories reveal that performance can deceive others, protect a self, and deepen the shame of those caught inside it.

The stage and the false interior

One of the clearest images is Sofia’s memory of being shown around the Chinese Theatre. From the audience-facing side, the scenery suggests a bar or restaurant, with a sea and sunset beyond the windows. Seen from behind, that convincing world is reduced to chipboard, duct tape, and clamps. The revelation does not simply show that scenery is artificial; it makes the contrast itself unsettling. What seemed like a coherent, welcoming place depends on a rough framework hidden from view. Sofia remembers feeling practically deceived because the backstage construction was so tawdry beside the cosy scene presented to the audience.

That memory becomes a way of reading another scene. For thirty minutes, Sofia watches what appears to be an inviting family gathering: everyone sits together on a large sofa, Lars Magnus Pettersson pours champagne, and they smile and toast. The scene is real in the sense that it is happening, yet Sofia experiences it as false, a performance whose surface cannot be trusted. Her stillness matters: she stands as if paralysed rather than joining the scene, positioned outside the apparent warmth and watching it as if it were a set.

Just before midnight, she calls Lars Magnus Pettersson’s number. She sees him flinch and understands that his phone is vibrating; after he says something and goes upstairs, a light comes on in a window and her own phone rings. The call exposes a second layer beneath the family tableau. The contrast is not simply between truth and a fabricated setting, but between a public scene of togetherness and a private connection that interrupts it. As in the theatre, what is visible has been arranged to produce an impression, while the concealed relations emerge only through a small disturbance in the performance.

Roles that take over

Performance also describes Sofia’s changing relation to her own identity. During an interview, when the subject turns to missing boys and dead boys in attics, she feels Victoria Bergman taking over. The lies arise without deliberate thought; Sofia knows the role by heart. Deception here is not presented as a carefully composed speech in which each falsehood is weighed. It has become a practiced response, available almost automatically, so that the boundary between acting a part and inhabiting it grows difficult to hold.

The episode gives performance a double force. It allows Sofia to control what she tells the interviewer, but it also suggests how thoroughly an assumed role can organize her conduct. She is not merely displaying a disguise from a secure position outside it: the lies appear by themselves, as part of a familiar act. The motif therefore connects public presentation with divided identity without making every performed role equivalent. The falsehood in the interview is a means of concealment; the remembered school performance, by contrast, exposes a history in which the roles themselves concealed who had power and who was being harmed.

The school film and the reversed role

Watching the school footage, Sofia sees Jessica, Hannah, and Victoria sitting on the floor while Fredrika Grünewald’s joke turns into humiliation. The girls had been promised chocolate pudding as a welcome gift, but Fredrika serves them real dog shit, using the spectacle to strengthen her hold over the younger girls. The camera zooms in on the three students. Its framing preserves their presence as an image, but the film also makes the hierarchy of the scene legible: the forced laughter does not register genuine amusement so much as an obligation imposed on the girls.

Sofia’s response complicates any simple division between the humiliated and the powerful. Seeing herself in the film, she feels pride because she had fought back and had been responsible for the final shock. She had played her role to the end. The footage thus records not only the ritual’s public performance but Sofia’s participation in shaping its outcome. The scene’s grotesque gift, the camera’s close attention to the girls, and Sofia’s pride all belong to the same event, but they do not mean the same thing: the group’s apparent laughter masks coercion, while Sofia’s later recognition of her own agency unsettles the role she had presented to her companions.

Facades, guilt, and what the act leaves behind

The old room extends the theatrical motif into Sofia’s remembered past. A photograph from year nine shows her with a radiant smile and lively eyes, but gives no indication of what was happening inside her. Her old swing still hangs in the garden; the red paint she remembers has flaked away, leaving dry yellow-brown patches. These details place the outward image beside the worn objects around it. The smiling photograph preserves an appearance, while the swing’s vanished paint makes change visible without explaining it. Sofia’s conclusion is that she had learned to play the game, not that the image disclosed her inner life.

Her strongest distress in this recollection is directed toward Hannah and Jessica, who were drawn into Victoria’s game without knowing that the idea had been Sofia’s all along. What began as a joke became serious, turning the episode into an experiment in guilt. In front of them, Sofia played the victim although she was, in fact, the opposite. That reversal makes performance morally consequential: the assumed role did not merely hide a private truth from strangers but shaped the understanding shared by people close to her. She spent three years sharing the shame with Hannah and Jessica, while the betrayal remained built into the story they thought they had lived together.

Across these scenes, performance is both a surface and an action. The theatre set shows how a convincing view is assembled; the family gathering reveals the unease of watching apparent intimacy from outside; the interview shows a practiced lie arriving without conscious effort; and the school film records a victim role concealing Sofia’s responsibility. The motif’s force lies in that movement from what can be seen to what the visible scene cannot settle. A smile, a toast, a rehearsed answer, or a staged ritual can make an account feel complete, but the novel repeatedly turns attention toward the hidden structure and the consequences that the performance leaves behind.