“This whole ‘women and children first’ is a myth,” says Ruben Östlund, director of the 2014 Swedish film Force Majeure. His movie poses the uncomfortable question: are men the heroic protectors of the family that society expects them to be, or simply slaves to a selfish survival instinct?

The black comedy Force Majeure earned the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, as well as dozens of other awards and nominations, including an American Golden Globe nod. If you haven’t seen it, it is definitely worth a watch; check it out here on Amazon Prime. It tells the story of Tomas, his wife Ebba, and their two children vacationing at a ski resort in the French Alps. While lunching at an outdoor restaurant, the family observes a controlled avalanche designed to prevent snow from piling up to dangerous levels.

But the avalanche rolls so swiftly and threatening close that Tomas panics and bolts, leaving his family to fend for themselves even though Ebba calls out to him to help her protect their children. When the expected catastrophe doesn’t materialize, the humiliated Tomas has exposed himself to be less of a man than a family patriarch is expected to be. The film is about him trying to recover his manhood as the family’s dynamics begin to disintegrate.

Decades of feminist erosion of traditional male roles notwithstanding, a man is still largely – and rightly – considered the protector of his family. If he fails at that, the shame and guilt can be especially profound. In Force Majeure, Tomas is struggling with what Östlund calls these “expectations on gender, the role of the man and the woman.” As the director told an interviewer: “Very often we are forced into those roles, like how a man should stand up and protect his family when something dangerous is happening. When Tomas doesn’t do that, he is in many ways losing his identity.”

So far, no argument from me. But then Östlund reveals a very pessimistic perspective on men: “We are struck by survival instinct,” he says. “It’s comparable to a truck going towards you and you throw yourself to the side. It’s not a rational thing. It’s just a reaction. This whole ‘women and children first’ is a myth.”

This notion makes for an intriguing film, but in reality Östlund has it completely backward. Studies confirm that it is not selfishness that derives from intuitive, spontaneous action, but altruism. People who risk their own lives to save others, even total strangers, are the ones who act on the right thing without thinking. Pausing to second-guess oneself is what leads to acts of self-preservation.

And Östlund’s example of throwing oneself out of the path of a truck is off the mark; one that is more appropriate to his film would be if that truck were bearing down on a man and his family. Would that man simply leap to safety, leaving his wife to pull their children out of the way? While no one can know for certain how he would react in a life-threatening situation, I find it almost impossible to envision any father I know – myself included – simply fleeing in panic as Tomas does in Force Majeure.

The director goes on to make another unflattering and misleading claim about men’s nature:

If you look at the percentages of survivors in ferry catastrophes, the ones who survive most are men. They tend to be aggressive. If you start to help people when it comes to a crisis situation, you don’t survive. Even though our culture teaches to stand up, when survival instinct comes in, culture goes out.

He is suggesting that men tend to survive disaster situations because their superior strength and aggression enable them to push the weaker aside, like Seinfeld’s George Costanza shoving his way through children and the elderly to escape a birthday party fire. The notable example of the Titanic aside, Östlund is correct that men on sinking ships out-survive women and children, though the reasons for this are unclear (one factor might be men’s generally hardier physical condition). But again, connecting this to the theme of his movie, his suggestion is that even family men would willingly abandon their own wives and children to a watery grave in order to save themselves.

When his interviewer asked Östlund about the film’s setting as a metaphor, he replied: “The ski resort is where man tries to control nature,” Östlund replied. “It’s a struggle between the civilized and the uncivilized. That is also happening for Tomas. He’s exposing an uncivilized side of himself that he wants to keep under control.”

That may be the case for his fictional character, but in the real world there are far too many examples of altruistic behavior at risk of life and limb to accept Östlund’s demeaning proposition that men are nothing more than instinctually selfish genes – especially when it comes to putting their lives on the line for their own families.