The Little Old Lady Who Broke All the Rules

Martha Andersson, a 79-year-old resident of Diamond House, a retirement home in Stockholm, dreams of robbing a bank. She wakes to grim reality: Since new owners took over the home, the kitchen has been axed, meals arrive under cellophane, and cost-cutting has stripped away nearly every comfort. Martha resolves to change things but knows she cannot act alone.

She gathers her four closest friends from their choir group, The Vocal Chord. Rake (Bertil Engström) is a former seaman and gardener, always hungry and elegantly dressed. Brains (Oscar Krupp) is an inventor with a solution for every problem. Christina Åkerblom, a former milliner, is the youngest at 77. Anna-Greta, a tall, assertive former bank clerk, speaks in a booming voice. Martha proposes their first rebellion: raiding the owners' private kitchen upstairs. Using a master key, the five discover luxury food purchased with residents' fees, cook a lavish midnight meal, and celebrate until they fall asleep at the table. Director Ingmar Mattson finds them the next morning and orders Nurse Barbara to handle the situation.

Barbara locks the group in their rooms and administers red pills "to calm them down," along with blue pills that suppress appetite to reduce food costs. Martha notices everyone growing lethargic and suspects over-medication. When she accidentally knocks her pills down the drain, she feels dramatically better within days. She and Brains discard their pills and begin planning an escape. When Mattson takes Barbara on a trip, a kind temporary nurse named Katia Erikson replaces her, granting the residents freedom and planting a seed of defiance.

Martha discovers a staff-only gym in the cellar and swaps the master key with a bent family heirloom key so no one notices. She leads the group in secret nightly workouts, concealing their true purpose. She and Brains show the others a documentary about Swedish prisons, revealing that inmates enjoy better food, exercise, and workshops than Diamond House residents. Martha suggests committing crimes to end up in prison. Though the others balk, the idea takes root.

When management changes the front door locks, the group escapes through the cellar one Sunday evening in March, takes taxis to the Grand Hotel, and checks into the Princess Lilian suite, funded by Anna-Greta's savings. Their first crime targets the hotel spa: Brains short-circuits the electronic safes to force guests to store valuables in a metal cupboard, Martha pours henbane (a sedative plant extract) and cannabis into the steam room, and Christina and Anna-Greta fake fainting to distract the receptionist while Brains picks the lock. The loot is mostly hairbrushes and mobile phones. They need something bigger.

Martha proposes stealing paintings from the National Museum and demanding ransom, a "kidnapping" of art that harms no one. After reconnaissance, they target a small Renoir and a Monet. On the morning of the heist, Anna-Greta triggers the alarm in the Rembrandt room to divert guards. Christina disables the surveillance camera in the Impressionist room. Brains cuts the paintings' cables with wire cutters hidden in his walker, and Martha conceals the canvases in her walker basket. Rake, stationed by the elevator with an OUT OF ORDER sign, swaps walkers with Martha and exits the front entrance with the stolen art while police rush in.

Back at the hotel, Christina disguises the paintings with watercolor additions and altered signatures, hanging them above the grand piano. The group composes a ransom note demanding 10 million kronor in two black Urbanista shopping trolleys to be placed on the Silja Serenade cruise ship to Finland.

Calling themselves the League of Pensioners, the five board a Viking Line ferry as a decoy, then sneak off to board the Silja Serenade instead. During the cruise, Anna-Greta meets Gunnar, an elderly gentleman, and a romance blossoms. On the return voyage, a severe storm scatters the trolleys on the car deck. They recover only one, containing bundles of banknotes. At customs, Martha truthfully declares the trolley holds ransom money, but no one believes her. Christina faints from low blood pressure, and the officials wave them through.

Back at the hotel, the disguised paintings have vanished. A temporary cleaner, Petra Strand, an art history student, judged them as poor reproductions and moved them to the annex. Ferry crewmen who cleaned the car deck unknowingly collect the missing trolleys and stash them in a dockside shed.

After hiding the remaining ransom money inside nylon tights lowered into the hotel's drainpipe, the group decides they must surrender to help recover the missing paintings. At the Kronoberg police station, they confess, but officers assume they are confused. Martha produces a 500-kronor note whose serial number matches the ransom, finally convincing them. The five are remanded and separated into different prisons.

At Hinseberg Women's Prison, Martha confronts Liza, a dominant inmate convicted of murder, and refuses to be subservient, earning the other prisoners' respect. She and Brains communicate through coded poems delivered by the prison chaplain, hiding messages about the drainpipe money and future plans. Christina and Anna-Greta join Martha at Hinseberg. When Liza presses Martha about the paintings, Martha secretly uses herbs to give Liza a stomach bug, delaying her release. Liza later absconds and tracks Petra to her student room, noticing unusually heavy gilded frames but fleeing before confirming her suspicion. Meanwhile, Petra discovers the paintings' true value, hides them behind royal portraits stapled over the canvases inside the original frames, and takes them home.

After roughly a year, the five are released and return to Diamond House. Martha discovers the missing second ransom trolley in the possession of Dolores, a 93-year-old fellow resident whose son, one of the ferry crewmen, gave it to her. Martha extracts the banknotes in a nighttime raid. She then receives an anonymous note demanding 100,000 kronor for the paintings' return. Using a double stroller with Christina's six-month-old granddaughter Malin as cover, they fill baby diapers with banknotes and make the exchange near the Grand Hotel. When they attempt to return the paintings to the museum, the stroller collapses in the elevator. Martha calls anonymously. Chief Inspector Petterson initially finds only cheap kitsch prints inside the gilded frames, which Petra had substituted after the original royal portrait covers were damaged by a spill, but Petterson later cuts into the frames and discovers the real Renoir and Monet beneath.

Now free and emboldened, the League plans what Martha calls "the ultimate crime": stealing money that has already been stolen. Brains learned from Juro, a Yugoslav mafia figure he met in prison, about a planned security van robbery. When the group breaks into the designated cellar, they find only potatoes; the robbery failed because dye ampoules ruined the banknotes. Pivoting, they target ATMs directly. Christina's son Anders drives the getaway van and uses deep-freezing technology to neutralize security dye and GPS trackers. They layer millions in banknotes between canvases sealed with plastic wrap and frame them with garish paintings from their Diamond House art club.

Pursued by both police and the Yugoslav mafia, Martha lures both cars to a church, where the police spot the mafia's Mercedes and give chase, abandoning the pensioners. At Arlanda airport, the framed paintings pass through security as carry-on luggage for a supposed art exhibit in Barbados. On the flight, Martha drafts two letters: one to the Swedish government establishing the "Friends of the Elderly" association, with demands for improving retirement home standards, funded by their Robbery Fund, the group's pool of stolen money earmarked for elderly care and charity; the other to the Stockholm police, revealing the drainpipe money as a donation to the Police Pension Fund. Armed with false identities, the group toasts their success and flies toward a new life in the Caribbean. In the epilogue, Inspector Strömbeck receives their taunting letter and crumples it in frustration, unable to trace the League of Pensioners.