I can be a monster sometimes

Continuing my trip up The Guardian's Top 50 Movies of 2020...

#31 :  Hvítur, Hvítur Dagur (A White, White Day)

Icelandic thriller about a policeman (played by Ingvar Sigurðsson) who discovers his recently deceased wife may have been having an affair with his friend; his grief and rage builds until violence appears inevitable.

Our second Icelandic film on the list, which seemed somewhat unlikely - but nothing compared to the coincidence that it begins with a scene which is extremely reminiscent of the previous Icelandic film where we travel behind a vehicle until it decides that following the road is a bit dull and it would be a lot more fun to drive off a cliff.  It's interesting to compare whether it works better at the beginning of the film or later on - but I was surprised to see the scene repeated.

There then follows an interesting cinematic technique whereby the same building is shown under different conditions but obviously denoting the passing of time - surprisingly effective and I was intrigued how long it took them to take all the shots they needed.  There is an argument they overuse the device - but the more they use it, the more you think "seriously, how long did this take them?".

However, 15 minutes into this film you're thinking "Is this the film The Guardian described?" - you know the wife's dead, but there's no sign of the friend at all.  He does pop along in a bit, but there's no danger of this film rushing things - parts of the film are glacially slow which resulted in me almost shouting at the screen "get a move on!"  It also features large swathes of typical Icelandic dialogue ie nobody saying anything.  And they're interspersed with the most bizarrely random scenes - a stone rolling down a hill (and then down some more.  and then some more), some extracts from a kids TV show where the main character is going on about them all dying, milk running slowly over the floor - all VERY Scandinavian.

And then, all of a sudden, your man really gets very angry indeed.  And then the film bizarrely gets really chatty.  And from that point on, it makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE AT ALL!!  And then it ends with a full frontal shot of his dead wife dancing in his living room.  I mean, some of it is very stylistic and some of it is just a bit "shouty man running around in the dark", but none of it makes any sense.  Not that it had made a lot of sense up to this point, but the nonsense meter just goes off the end of the dial - I even resorted to the internet to try and work out wtf had happened and I couldn't find anyone on the whole internet who was prepared to even make a stab at what had occurred.  Rotten Tomatoes has 71 critic reviews and ZERO audience reviews and, given that you normally can't shut Wikipedia up from giving spoilers during their plot summaries, it amused me greatly to see they have about as much on it as the initial description above so I suspect someone started trying to explain things and then just gave up.

In a lot of ways, the film is not well shot technically - there's a lot of blur and loss of focus and it's not clear whether this is intentional or down to budget constraints (or mere technical incompetence, but that seems unlikely). And then there are other bits that you think "woah, that's well done" - it's quite odd.  I can understand why the critics liked it and the director certainly shows promise but it's somewhat jarring a lot of the time.

I do think it's well acted - the relationship between Ingvar Sigurðsson (who plays the main character) and Ída Mekkín Hlynsdóttir (who plays his granddaughter - and is the director's daughter) appears believable (if somewhat odd - especially when you consider how little time she seems to spend with her parents).  Everyone else is fine but doesn't have a lot to do, except for the horses which the film has a weird obsession with - I appreciate there may be a lot of them on Iceland, but they appear in the weirdest shots in this film (it was quite fun spotting them and going "there's another one!" - but I doubt that was the point to them).

So, is this film is multi-textural exploration of grief and rage or is it, in fact, a load of old bollocks?  I know where my suspicions lie - I enjoyed some of the techniques and skill on display and found the set-up intriguing, but was ultimately let down by the ending.  I don't expect all films to tie everything up with a nice bow, but I don't enjoy the last 10 minutes asking more questions than they answer.

At time of writing, the film is available to rent in most of the usual places but I struggle to describe it as something that too many people would enjoy. 

#32 - Good, but not fun
#30 - Intriguing but ultimately disappointing