Niclas Larsson, Film Director, Waits for Success in New York’s Garment District

If old age is not for snowflakes — well, try directing a 90-minute feature film about old age in the iPhone era, as Niclas Larsson has done.

Mr. Larsson, 33, greeted me on a recent morning into his 15th-floor terraced apartment in a former button factory in Manhattan, looking eerily like his dog, a blond lurcher named Ted, the way many owners do. He had settled here, the garment district of Midtown Manhattan, after rejecting “hipper” quarters in Brooklyn and the financial district.

A native Swede with a deep appreciation of Americana, he was offering strong black coffee and strong opinions on where his new movie, “Mother, Couch,” should be seen, like the Angelika theater downtown, where it opens on Friday, and the Nuart in Los Angeles.

“Hollywood is like, What’s going on?” Mr. Larsson said, considering the summer box office, which has thus far been a faint shadow of last year’s Barbenheimer. “No one knows what’s going on. But I want to give the nerds the option of going to the theater. It’s made for a theater. It’s shot on 35 — it’s all the film nerdy things in there.”

“You know what also about a theater that we forget is the God perspective of people telling us a story,” he went on. “People forget — the big shadow plays they did around the fires in the Stone Age? They did them large, because it’s important.”

“Mother, Couch,” based on “Mamma i soffa,” a 2020 Swedish novel by Jerker Virdborg, and shot to some local excitement in Charlotte, N.C., indeed takes on large themes, including mortality, parenthood and that Gen Z bugaboo, capitalism.